The Princess Murderer by Geniwate and Deena Larsen
The Free Culture Game by Molleindustria
The Marriage by Rod Humble
Samorost 2 by Amanita Design
The Graveyard by Tale of Tales
Gravitation by Jason Rohrer

discussed by Edward Picot

This article is co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange.

Computer games enjoy a special position in the canon of new media art. One of the most distinctive features of new media is its interactivity, and because computer games are inherently interactive they have always attracted a good deal of attention from new media theoreticians. They seem to offer the opportunity to create artforms which are participative rather than dictatorial in structure, and thus to redefine the relationship between artist and audience. No longer will audience-members simply act as passive recipients of whatever the artist chooses to put in front of them: instead, through their interactivity, they will become co-creators.

Oddly enough this line of thought has been particularly important in the field of hyperliterature. This is partly for historical reasons: in the 1970s and 1980s home computers had little or no graphics capabilities, and an adventure-game interface entirely based on text and imagination was a good way of sidestepping the problem. Early “interactive fiction”, as it became known, derived a good deal of its inspiration and functionality from the hugely-popular dice-and-rulebook role-playing games of the 1970s, notably Dungeons and Dragons – which in turn derived their inspiration largely from Adult Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery novels. Computerised role-playing games, therefore, were literary in style not only because they were initially text-based, but because they had a literary ancestry – and this ancestry remained very much in evidence at least up until Myst, initially released in 1993, which was the biggest-selling PC game of all time until The Sims replaced it in 2002.

The interactive fiction genre was also associated with hyperliterature because it reached its creative peak in the 1980s, at the same time as hypertext fiction was coming into existence via Hypercard (a system of interlinked hypertext pages, created prior to the Web itself, which was pre-installed on Mac computers from 1987 onwards). The students and young academics, mainly American, who embraced hypertext fiction as a new literary form were often quick to embrace interactive fiction too, and it has remained a cornerstone of hyperliterary theory in the USA ever since. The New Media Reader (2003), edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, included not only a good deal of discussion of early computer games, but a CD with emulations of “Spacewar!”, “Missile Command”, “Adventure”, and “Karateka”. Likewise, Volume One of the Electronic Literature Collection (http://collection.eliterature.org/) (2006) included a number of interactive fictions: “All Roads”, “Whom the Telling Changed”, “Bad Machine”, “Galatea” and “Savoir-Faire”.

The insistence on interactivity as an important element of hyperliterature – and on computerised role-playing games as a paradigm of interactive art – has always begged a number of questions, however. First of all, champions of “traditional” literature are inclined to argue that new media theorists are starting from an incorrect model of the relationship between author and reader. Readers do not receive text “passively” – they interpret it, and many modern(ist) texts, far from spoon-feeding their readers with predigested messages, are deliberately written in fragmented, ambiguous or enigmatic ways so as to oblige the audience to make interpretations. If this is granted, then the claim that interactive fiction is “liberating” its readers by re-defining their relationship with its authors begins to look simplistic.

Furthermore, some new media practitioners themselves have come to the conclusion that far from setting the audience free, involving them in a game rather than simply giving them text to read is trading one form of control for another. Geniwate and Deena Larsen, for example, writing in about their piece The Princess Murderer in 2003, commented that they “wanted to create this frustration of power and powerlessness as a response to early hypertext works that placed readers as coauthor…” (http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=76). The work – pointedly subtitled “No Exit” – deliberately uses interactivity as a means of entrapping readers or viewers rather than liberating them.

But the fundamental question, which haunts all attempts to create art from computer games, is whether it is really possible to reconcile the two. It could be argued that art requires a different kind of concentration from a game, and uses a different part of the mind – and that the more intensely you play a game, the less inclined you will be to pay attention to any artistic qualities it may possess.

The Princess Murderer exemplifies the problem. It isn’t by any means a fully-fledged computer game, but a hyperfiction which incorporates a number of game-style design elements. It’s cleverly-conceived and well-written, but its Achilles’ heel is the fact that the more you engage with its game-playing aspects – basically, clicking rapidly from one “page” to another in order to change the scores displayed at the bottom of the screen – the more difficult it becomes to pay attention to its literary content.

Another more recent example of the same difficulty is the Free Culture Game (2008), from Italian collective Molleindustria. This game bills itself as “playable theory”, and as the introductory screens explain it illustrates the conflict between the market, where “knowledge is commodified and sold”, and “the common”, where “knowledge is cooperatively created and shared”. The common is a white circle in the middle of the screen, inhabited by a number of green stick-men with lightbulbs popping out of their heads. Round the outside of the white circle prowls “the vectorialist”, a rapacious copyright symbol which magnetises and gobbles up the lightbulbs unless you, the player, can guide them back towards the green men with your cursor. If the vectorialist gobbles up all the lightbulbs, the green men turn grey and stop producing new ones. Again, it’s a nice piece of design, but the first problem is that its meaning is too thoroughly explained in the introductory screens – the vectorialist’s aim is to “copyright ideas and create scarcity in the common”, and “people who can’t access knowledge in the common will stop producing new ideas and turn into passive consumers”. The game itself merely illustrates these statements without developing them. On the other hand, once you start to play, you quickly become absorbed by the slightly-irritating challenge of trying to keep ideas away from the vectorialist, and the trickiness of this task distracts you from the meaning of the game, instead of reinforcing it.

The same problem even haunts Rod Humble’s celebrated computer art-game The Marriage (2006). Humble, according to Wikipedia, “is the executive producer for the Sims division of the video game company Electronic Arts since 2004. He has been contributing to the development of games since 1990, and is best known for his work on the Electronic Arts titles, The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.” The Marriage has been widely written up and generally well received within the gaming community. It starts with a blue square and a pink square floating towards each other until they “kiss” – whereupon the blue square gets smaller and fainter, while the pink one gets larger and more distinct. Through the screen fall a number of coloured circles. Contact with these circles makes the squares larger, unless the circle is black, in which case it makes them smaller. Over time the pink square fades, and can only be made distinct again by contact with the blue one – but this contact makes the blue square smaller and fainter. If either square becomes too small or indistinct, the game will be over. You can make them float towards each other by mousing over them – and the trick is to allow them to drift apart until they have “eaten” some of the circles, and thus enlarged themselves, but to bring them back for a “kiss” in time to prevent the pink square from disappearing. If you can manage to keep this going, then as the game progresses the screen-background will go through a number of colour changes, from blue to purple to green to pink and eventually to black – and your couple will then disintegrate in a firework-display of tiny pink and blue squares, which is the closest you get to “winning”.

The main thing which makes us regard this game as a work of art is its title, The Marriage. If it was called “Keep the Squares Alive” it would probably never occur to us to search for meanings in the game rather than just playing it; but because of the title, we immediately identify the blue square as male, the pink as female, and their drifting-together as the start of a relationship. As a knock-on effect, we feel inclined to interpret all the other game-elements symbolically as well – the falling circles are life-events, the black circles are bad things happening, the differently-coloured screen-backgrounds represent different stages of the marriage, and so forth. The directness with which The Marriage presents itself to us and demands this effort of interpretation is undeniably poetic in its effect – but there are problems. The first one is that the colours blue and pink, although they enable us to identify one square as male and the other as female, suggest a rather stereotypical view of the sexes, and various other aspects of the game seem questionable in the same way. Why does the blue square get larger and better-defined as it drifts around colliding with circles, whereas the pink square gets larger to a lesser degree, and keeps fading? Why can the pink square only become well-defined again by re-colliding with the blue, and why does this contact make pink larger and blue smaller? But the second problem is the familiar one: after you have played the game for a while, you stop thinking about what the various symbols on-screen represent, and just want to keep the squares going for as long as possible. The artistic meaning of the game fades into the background, and the activity of playing it takes over.

Despite these flaws, The Marriage undeniably has an artistic impact. Humble himself has written an extremely suggestive article about the artistic potential of games – “Game Rules as Art”, published in The Escapist in April 2006. In this article he argues that

…the rules of a game can give an artistic statement independent of its other components.

– and as an example of what he means, he cites (amongst others) Snakes and Ladders:

As a lesson about life’s nature, Snakes and Ladders is interesting work: Firstly, it is entirely luck based, and secondly, no matter how well someone appears to be doing, there is always a chance he will land on a snake… and be whisked back down the board.

So far so convincing, but Humble is on less certain ground when he argues that the power of game-rules derives from childhood psychology:

I believe that childhood play is about practising within the rules designed for adulthood, testing them out in a pretend world first. Later on, grownups deconstruct literature or art for rules (and the ways they have been tested) in a similar fashion.

This seems rather a simplistic view, both of childhood play and its purposes, and of grownup attitudes towards literature and art. Humble would like to establish rules as the common denominator between games and art, but although some types of creative work are undoubtedly rule-governed – a sonnet, a fugue, a lumiere video or an Oulipo project, for example – the rules in these cases differ from game-rules, in that they affect the artists and their endeavours, rather than the audience and their interactions; and it remains far from clear whether rules are a defining characteristic of the arts right across the spectrum. But Humble goes on to categorise different types of game in terms of whether their rules are created in advance or on-the-fly, suggesting that there are four categories:

1. Rules are created in advance, and fully understood by the players as they play (eg. Snakes and Ladders)
2. Rules are created in advance, but too complex to be remembered, and therefore a book or umpire is required to clarify them during play (eg. Dungeons and Dragons)
3. Rules are created in advance, but modified during play (eg. “professional military umpired war games”)
4. Rules are created when the game starts, and modified during play (“This type includes children’s play or make believe”)

It is in the fourth of these categories that Humble’s over-emphasis on rules becomes problematic. “Children’s play or make believe” is not necessarily rule-governed at all. To a child, the phrase “Let’s play!” means something different from “Let’s play a game!” The second phrase means “Let’s play a game with predefined rules”, whereas the first means “Let’s have fun”, and may involve rules or may not. When my brother was six or seven years old, his favourite pastime was digging holes in the back garden. Rules were imposed on him – “Don’t you dig up my flowerbeds!” – but these were nothing to do with his enjoyment of the activity. Nor was it in any direct way a preparation for adult life. Was digging holes a game? Not by any normal definition. Was it play? Certainly. Running and jumping, make-pretend, pulling faces, standing on one leg, skipping, singing, painting and playing Monopoly are all types of play, but not all of them are games, because not all of them have rules. In other words, games – recreational activities defined by their rules – are a subset of play; and play is a spectrum of behaviour which also includes the arts (such as painting and make-pretend).

Humble’s attempt to create a link between games and art by suggesting that both activities are rule-governed is ultimately unconvincing. But this is not to say that there cannot be common ground between the two, or to deny that – as in the Snakes and Ladders example – rules can sometimes convey meaning. And where Humble’s analysis is really useful is that it allows him to see through what most people regard as the most important aspects of computer games – “representation systems” and “simulation”, as he puts it – to the inner structure. It is this insight which allows him to drastically strip away so many of the computer game’s most familiar gizmos and strategies – the levels, the lives, the point-scoring systems, the sound-effects and most of the visual effects too – in The Marriage, until he arrives at something which combines some of the visual qualities of abstract art with some of the economy of suggestion of a modern poem.

Simplification of format seems to be a common feature amongst the more successful computerised art-games. Samorost 2 (2005), from the Czech company Amanita Design, is another example. It’s basically a puzzle-solving game. A little cartoon man lives on a small planet with a dog and a pear-orchard. The game begins with two aliens landing in a rocket, stealing his pears and abducting his dog. The little man launches his own rocket and sets off in pursuit. The rest of the game takes us through a number of screens as the little man attempts to get his dog back, but finds himself confronted by one difficulty after another. In each screen there is a puzzle which has to be solved before he can make any further progress – in one, for example, he comes to a flooded chamber and has to work out how to drain away the water before he can reach the submerged exit. This is accomplished by pulling a flush mechanism and then turning a stopcock to prevent the water from coming back.

One reason why Samorost 2 works in artistic terms is because it doesn’t hurry us. You can take as much time as you want (or need) working out the puzzle on each screen, which means that your attention isn’t dragged away from the game’s artistic aspects by the need to get on with playing it. And the artistic aspects are well worth noticing. The graphic design is wonderfully quirky, full of textures such as bark, moss and rust which give the Samorost universe a unique identity – small-scale, retro and homely – not at all what you would normally expect from a science-fiction computer game. There are also numerous flashes of humour. At the start of the game, for example, the little man has to bang a dozing robot over the head to make him open an iron gate; in order to do this he has to steal a mallet from a slug-monster; and he obtains the mallet by concocting a potion which makes the slug-monster drunk.

What takes the game one step further into artistic territory, however, is that as the little man reaches the end of his quest we learn why the aliens stole his pears and abducted his dog in the first place. He finds himself in a pear-pickling factory. The aliens, it turns out, serve a hedonistic slug-king addicted to pickled pears, and they have imprisoned the dog in a treadmill (with a sausage just out of reach to keep him running), which drives a fan to keep the slug-king cool. It’s all very light-hearted, but even so it does give us the feeling that in playing Samorost we are doing more than just solving a series of puzzles: we are exploring a world, and unearthing its secrets.

One last aspect of Samorost worth noticing is our relationship with the little man himself. Because he has quite a distinct character of his own, when we play the game we don’t really feel that we are inside him. Again, the pace of the game helps with this effect. When you play a high-pressure game in which, so to speak, you are constantly having to fight or run for your life, there is no room for a sense of separation between yourself and your avatar. In Samorost, on the other hand, there is an odd and persistent sense that it’s the little man himself who is solving the puzzles on each screen – even though it’s really us. In the flooded chamber, we’re the ones who have to work out how to pull the flush and turn the stopcock in order to get rid of the water – yet when we succeed, we feel as if the little man has done it. And this sense of watching a character from the outside as he makes progress through the game is part of what makes Samorost feel more like a story than a conventional computer game.

Interestingly, this sense of separation from the central character is also a feature of Tale of Tales’ 2008 game The Graveyard. In this game, our task as players is simply to guide an old lady along a path through the middle of a cemetery, until she comes to a bench in front of a chapel. When she sits on this bench the game enters a non-interactive sequence, in which a song on the theme of mortality is sung in Flemish, with subtitles. After the song is over we are able to control the old lady again, and our task is to walk her back out of the cemetery, which completes the game. The only variation is that if we pay $5 for the full version, the old lady may die while she is sitting on the bench.

A lot of the discussion about this game has focussed on two questions: firstly whether it’s really a game at all, and secondly whether it would have been just as effective as a short film, given that the middle section is non-interactive, and that your options as a player are strictly limited even when you are supposedly “in control” of the avatar. On the first question, Michael Samyn himself (one of the co-founders of Tale of Tales, the other being Aureia Harvey) responds by attacking the boundary which separates games from art:

We don’t mind calling our work games because we believe that contemporary computer games have already crossed the borders of traditional games. Most of them just don’t realize it yet. They don’t realize that the most interesting aspect of their design is the way in which they express the story: through the environment, the animations, the colour, the lighting, etc… [But] when we talk about “story” … we don’t mean linear plot-based narrative constructions… we refer to the meanings of the game, the content, its theme… With Tale of Tales, we try to develop a new form of interactive entertainment. One that exploits the medium’s capacity of immersion and simulation to tell its story… It is the experience that matters, not the length of the game or the number of levels or enemies or weapons, etcetera. (http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/the-graveyard-post-mortem/)

These remarks also shape an answer to the second question – whether The Graveyard would have been just as effective as a short film. Samyn’s argument is that a computer game possesses qualities of interaction, immersion and simulation which cannot be reproduced in other media, and which make players experience the content of the game quite differently from a film or a written narrative. Interactivity is the key ingredient, but not the only one. In The Graveyard, the three-dimensional environment also plays a very important part. The virtual cemetery through which we guide the old lady is displayed on the screen in two dimensions, but it was created using 3D software, and the sense that we are moving into the cemetery as the old lady walks, rather than looking at a framed picture of it, is central to the feel of the piece. The 3D modelling gives a feeling of perspectives changing all around us as we move. As in Samorost, playing the game is a way of exploring a world: and as in Tale of Tales’ other games, The Endless Forest and (most recently) The Path, this sense is greatly augmented not only by effects of light and shade – clouds passing overhead, turning the environment from sunny to shady and back again – and by the sound-environment – the noise of traffic from outside the cemetery, birds twittering, a dog barking – but also by a sense of what we can’t see: a feeling that the three dimensional structures in the game are blocking our view at times, which implies that there is more in the game-world than we are being shown.

In some respects the game’s most important qualities are negative ones: it makes its statement as much in terms of what it isn’t, and what it doesn’t do, as in terms of what it is and does. It is such a deliberately dialectical and provocative piece, a poke in the eye for “traditional” computer games design, that it’s really no wonder it has provoked howls of outrage from the diehard gaming community. (“The Graveyard… infuriates me. I think it’s a pretentious, ineffective waste of the interactive medium, and I hate it.” – Anthony Burch, http://www.destructoid.com/indie-nation-39-the-graveyard-110611.phtml, July 2008.) It’s a game set in a cemetery; the central character is a decrepit old lady; you can’t make her jump or fly or even walk very fast; there’s no point-scoring, no way of winning, no challenge to be overcome and no skill involved in playing. Furthermore the range of things you can do as a player is so strictly limited that the word “interactive” is almost a misnomer. Almost, but not quite. What nobody seems to have picked up on is that the tension between what we expect to be able to do as computer-game players and what we are allowed to do within The Graveyard is one of the game’s most important messages. The sense of frustration, thwarted expectation and powerlessness is intentional. This is what old age and death are like: you run out of options: all you can do is follow a pre-ordained path. But within this grim message there is a hint of positive philosophy. Life, the game seems to be saying, is not necessarily about doing, achieving and winning: it’s about experiencing. Your aim should not be to overcome the universe in which you find yourself, not to win prizes from it, but to attune yourself to it. Beyond The Graveyard’s critique of “traditional” computer-game design lies a wider critique of our consumerist, achievement-oriented, individualistic society.

In The Graveyard it isn’t just the content of the game which is significant, but the underlying structure: it isn’t just the fact that we recognise the gaming environment as a cemetery and the avatar as a little old lady; it’s also the fact that our options as players are very strictly limited and it’s impossible to make the game go very fast. This use of structure to convey meaning is something which The Graveyard shares with Jason Rohrer’s Gravitation. In Gravitation, your avatar is a pixellated man, who you initially discover standing next to a fireplace, in a small illuminated square surrounded by blackness. If you walk to the left, the square travels with you, and you discover a yellow-haired child with a red ball. The child throws the ball towards you, wanting you to play. If you get underneath the ball and bounce it back towards the child, the child starts to emit love-hearts, the illuminated screen around your avatar expands, and you can see that above the room in which you are playing there is a maze of upper levels. After you have played with the child for a bit, the illuminated area around your avatar expands to its maximum, flames start to come out of the top of your avatar’s head, and by pressing the space-bar you can jump up into the upper levels and explore them. They are full of stars, which tumble down to the bottom as soon as you touch them. After a short while the illuminated square begins to shrink again, and your jumping power declines, which means you have to go back down to the bottom to refresh your powers.

When you get there, you find the child walled in by the stars you have collected, which have turned to blocks of ice with scores on them. You can free the child – and collect your points – by pushing these blocks into the fireplace, where they melt. Then if you play with the child again your powers of inspiration come back, and you can once more leap into the upper levels. You can only do this a couple of times, however, before you find that when you return to the bottom of the game the child has vanished and there is nothing left but the red ball. This is the game’s most intensely emotional moment: the illuminated square has shrunk back to its smallest dimensions, and you find yourself walking your avatar up and down in the dark, in an attempt to discover where the child has got to. The game is time-limited (at eight minutes), but it normally goes on for a while after the child’s disappearance. Furthermore, the illuminated square expands again after a while, and your leaping power comes back – which gives you a chance to reflect on how different the leaping and star-collecting feel when there’s nobody else in the game apart from yourself.

Rohrer describes this as a game “about mania, melancholia, and the creative process”. It’s also, of course, about the relationship between a parent and a child. Playing with your child fills you with inspiration, but in order to pursue your ideas (or, to put it another way, in order to use them as a means of earning points) you have to abandon the child and risk not only disappointing but losing him or her. As in The Graveyard, the limits placed on what you can do as a player are integral to the meaning of the piece – you can only acquire the ability to jump to the upper levels of the game, and thus to score points, by playing with your child; but when you get into the upper levels you can’t see the child any more. Unlike The Graveyard, however, Gravitation has more of the attributes of an orthodox computer-game: point-scoring, a time-limit and an element of skill (jumping from ledge to ledge in the upper levels requires some dexterity). Where the game departs from orthodoxy is that it seems to suggest that point-scoring may be a waste of time, or perhaps even harmful. It doesn’t really get you anywhere – it doesn’t, for example, earn you access to another level – and when you return to the bottom level you will either find that the stars you collected have walled your child into a corner, or that your child has disappeared entirely.

In this way, like The Graveyard, Gravitation seems to be offering a critique of the normal game-playing mindset. If you don’t go into the upper levels at all, you can spend the entire game playing with the child, and the child won’t disappear – but you won’t score any points. Thus you can play the game “safely”, but only by resolutely ignoring much of its potential. As soon as you fully engage with it, and start trying to score points, you gain in one way but lose in another. The effect is one of irony and complexity. Instead of the usual game-playing credo, that winning equates with virtue, Gravitation seems to be suggesting that in life there are no clear-cut winners and losers, only difficult questions with no correct answers.

From these examples there seems little doubt that the answer to the question whether computer games can also be art is yes. It may be possible to object that The Graveyard pushes so far in the direction of art that it ceases to qualify as a game, but this accusation cannot be levelled at The Marriage, Samorost or Gravitation. Furthermore, although there is an ever-present danger that game-play and artistic appreciation may be at odds with one another, these games show that there are various strategies which can be used to get around the difficulty. The first is to use the structure of the game itself for symbolic purposes. The second is to slow the game right down, eliminate time-constraints and do away with the need for players to display skill or dexterity – thus allowing them more freedom to concentrate on the game’s artistic aspects. The third is to create a sense of separation between the player and the game’s central character, so that the unfolding of the game becomes less like a personal challenge and more like the unfolding of a story.

But the most obvious strategy, used by all of these games, is simply to choose an unusual game-scenario and develop it in an unorthodox manner: a marriage, a little man trying to get his dog back from aliens, an old lady visiting a cemetery, or a man getting inspiration by playing with his child. All of these games make us stop and think simply because they are different from what we would normally expect.

According to an article Esquire magazine published about Jason Rohrer in 2008,

Clint Hocking, a designer at Ubisoft best known for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, was so blown away by Passage [Rohrer’s previous game] that he made it a focus of his Game Developers Conference talk earlier this year. In front of an audience full of the industry’s most influential game designers, Hocking growled, “Why can’t we make a game that fucking means something? A game that matters? You know?”… Then he put up a slide of another small indie game, the Marriage, coded by Rohrer’s friend Rod Humble. “I think it sucks ass that two guys tinkering away in their spare time have done as much or more to advance the industry this year than the other hundred thousand of us working fifty-hour weeks,” said Hocking. (www.esquire.com)

But the fact that these games are produced by individuals or small teams is significant in itself, of course. It’s far easier for individuals and small teams to come up with something really original than for large organisations working fifty-hour weeks and locked into an industrial cycle of production and mass-marketing. The problem in the past has always been that such small-scale individualistic work has found it difficult to reach an audience: but the Web has changed the laws of the marketplace to some extent; and the Web’s potential for bringing really original work to the attention of interested parties right across the developed world may be the real key to the future development of computer games as art.

copyright – Edward Picot, May 2009

Art and Revolution – Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century
Gerald Raunig
Semiotext(e) 2007
ISBN 1584350466

“Art and Revolution – Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century” by Gerald Raunig is a book that presents and contextualises artists engagement with revolutionary moments over the last one hundred and fifty years. The history of artists’ involvement with the revolutionary movements of the modern era that it presents is compelling for artists looking for something more than the art market. And the theoretical framework that it uses as the context for this history is surprisingly pertinent to the post-credit-crunch new world order.

Starting with a youthful revolutionary called Wagner who after struggling to bring about the revolution in Germany later went on to write the occasional opera, focussing on the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik counter-revolution, then continuing through the Situationists and May ’68 to the anti-globalization movement, Raunig presents the moments in modern history where real artists and real revolution, or at least its potential, have touched. The more recent moments, notably the anti-globalization protests at the G8 summit in Genoa, are less convincing as moments both of revolutionary and artistic potential. But they contrast informatively with the earlier examples.

I have studied both European History and History of Art but within the first few pages Raunig had told me things I had not even suspected about well known cultural figures and tied their activities into a critical framework that added to understanding of their activities rather than judging them as simple failures to live up to an imagined revolutionary ideal. Raunig does use the language and concepts of contemporary academic Marxist criticism but this is standard for current art writing and the history he presents is explicated rather than obscured by the social and political historical context that this provides.

Raunig neither romanticises nor dismisses the very real achievements and failings of artists caught up in the revolutionary moments of what he calls the long Twentieth Century. When art and revolution meet the result can be folly, careerism, empty gestures, cowardly complicity or false dawns. But there are moments where artists have helped to make the new social order not just concrete and visible. Iconoclasm such as Courbet’s tearing down of the Vendome Column in the Paris Commune, and iconography such as Stalinism’s Socialist Realism have both played their very real and very effective part in destroying old political and social orders and introducing new ones.

“Transversal Activism” was written after Francis Fukayama’s risible neoliberal end-of-history claims had been proven wrong by the rise of political Islam but before it had also been proven wrong by the credit crunch. The credit bubble bursting has made it harder to claim that the revolutionary moment has entirely passed. Revolution is not imminent, but nor does a world where it might be possible seem unthinkable any more when the global economy has recently been described as being months or even just hours from collapse. And the clear class content of the act of socialising private losses of fictitious capital have started even the most Fukuyaman observers conscious of class politics once more.

Aileen Derieg’s translation for the Semiotext(e) English language edition deserves recognition for its clarity and flow. Semiotext(e)’s mission to bring the best continental philosophy to an Anglophone audience is well served by such competent translation.

Revolution may not be imminent, but with the art market, the global economy and the planet’s ecosystem all in danger of collapse more and more artists are looking for models for genuine political engagement in art rather than “career building bullshit that cares”, to quote Art & Language. “Transversal Activism” provides engaging and instructive case studies of political and artistic success and failure at moments of political possibility contextualised for a contemporary artworld and academic audience. Raunig has produced a very readable and instructive set of historical case studies not so much of praxis as of actually doing something.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

The first NODE.London Season of Media Arts in 2006 was conceived as an experiment in tools and structures of cooperation as invented or adapted by artists, technologists, and activists, many of whom were committed to ideas of social change through their practice. It was to be an experiment in radical openness. Not just to be confined to participatory artistic processes and events but also applied to the method of organisation.

This text by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett is a reflection on the NODE.London “experiment”, its context, its cultures and the make up of its events, infrastructure and organisation. It points to some earlier grassroots media arts festivals in London and gives a bare­bones description of the components of the NODE.London 2006 season. Taking Felix Stalder’s analysis of the difference between Open Source and Open Culture, this text looks at how different ideas and approaches to networks and openness were played out in the first season. With a focus on organisational matters, it further makes some judgements about where these were fruitful and where they were problematic. Finally it looks at the work of OpenOrganizations as one example of alternative frameworks for grassroots organisations and suggests that by directly addressing the particular problem of organisation, it might be possible and worthwhile to support the development of grassroots media arts infrastructure in London, including the possible iterations of a NODE.London season.

Download full text here (pdf 640k)

Also published and translated into German by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP) 2008

Furtherfield in support of Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day was conceived of and promoted by Suw Charman-Anderson as a way of “bringing women in technology to the fore”. It was successful in motivating nearly 2000 people to publish a blog post about a woman in technology whom they admired. In support of Ada Lovelace Day we invited women working in media arts to join the NetBehaviour.org email list for a week, between 23rd and 30th March. They were invited to post information about their own work alongside the work of other women who had inspired them in their own practice. Some names came up a number of times but with different stories and for very different reasons. NetBehaviour provided a context for sharing and discussing influences and tracing connections: artistic, practical, theoretical, technical, historical, personal. For readability this edited list does not include all of the discussion but this can be traced back through the NetBehaviour archives. Some contributors were anxious about the many excellent people who may have been missed out. We know this is not a definitive survey or list but it is an excellent resource and just one possible starting point for anyone wanting to know more about women working in media art.

A big THANKS to all of those – women and men – who contributed to this tribute!

Click here to view project:
http://www.furtherfield.org/ada_lovelace.php

Pall Thayer’s Microcodes are short code art pieces written in Perl and presented on a website for viewers to read, download, and execute. Each code piece encapsulates tasks performed by artworks such as portraiture or memento mori. They follow on from Thayer’s earlier “Exist.pl”, which allegorized life, death and being using running Perl code.

This is a Romantic use of code, a projection of human experience onto mere material existence. Processes become lives or individuals, network sockets become voices or eyes. And in a Nietschean twist some of the code can be genuinely destructive for data. But it works the other way round as well, demonstrating that meaning can be found in or recovered from mere processes.

The program listings are presented on a modern, neutrally styled, website for download and execution. The code is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 (or later), so everyone is free to use, study, modify and redistribute it. The use of the GPL should be a given for code art, but far too many artists are happy to take the freedom that they are given by other hackers and not pass it on. Thayer deserves credit for doing the right thing.

You can send modified versions back to be published on the Microcodes website, something that resembles social media and collaborative web projects, but this isn’t yet the focus of the project. Given the opposition between social media and computer programming that some commentators have tried to establish (myself included), it is refreshing to see a project that uses elements of both where both can add to it.

Historically, “microcode” is the inner programming of microprocessors such as the ARM or Pentium, the level below machine code. Thayer’s Microcodes are short (micro) programs (code) written in the programming language Perl. Perl is a well-established and popular language for scripting and for web programming. It is a more typographic language than many, with a rich and intentionally ambiguous syntax. This makes it ideal both for expressive programming and for visually interesting program listings.

Perl is installed on modern operating systems by default (and can easily be installed on Windows). Running a Perl script in 2009 therefore requires minimal geekery. But Perl is a strange-looking enough language, even compared to newer scripting languages and other C-style-syntax (curly-brace-based) languages, that using it emphasizes the strangeness of code and makes its structures visually noticeable.

Like any Perl script each Microcode creates a composition of relationships between operating system resources such as processes, network sockets and files. Unlike most Perl scripts this is the intended end result of the code, not a side effect of its execution or the means to the end of the program’s effects as for example a UNIX command-line tool. The process of executing the code is intended for contemplation rather than for instrumentalization. The incidental or contingent becomes the primary or key.

Information workers spend at least eight hours a day “in” the digital landscape of the computer or the network. This is their landscape. Software that depicts this environment is in a way the landscape or land art of the UNIX hegemony. It functions as paintings of Venice or as stone circles for hackers and for anyone whose life is touched by technology.

Software is both performed, as something that is written by a programmer, and performance, as something that performs a task. Making that performance the focus of the software’s execution makes the software the intended result and subject of both acts. Software debuggers observe and present the inner working of the operation of other pieces of software, but not of themselves. It’s a bad old joke in aesthetics that art is defined by its inutility. But it is true that code that does nothing other than what it does must in some way be doing (or being) itself and that if this is the intended result of executing the software then this must be intended to be interesting in some way.

When I was at art school I took up programming as one means of resisting the local hegemony of art-as-text under the stultifying academic regime of semiotics-and-Marxism. Programming is a specific, technical competence that cannot be replaced with “generic” textual or managerial skills. Artistic practice also consists at some level of technical competences. This upsets both managerialistic critics and curators (who need interchangeable and easily ventriloquised art) and managerialistic artists (who need interchangeable and easily ventriloquised artisans to actually make the products of their semiotic genius).

I, and others, have claimed that artists who use computers need to be able to program. Artists who, whatever their intent, accept computers as closed tools are often offended by this. But mastery of tools is a prerequisite for competent expression. There is the question of at what level this mastery needs to be demonstrated, though. If one wishes to be an Impressionist should one master colour theory while using pre-mixed oil paint in tubes or does one need to master molecular chemistry?

Thayer’s work is competent programming but as a project it is socially open. You don’t need to be able to program to appreciate or add to it. It can be taken and modified as an aesthetic as well as executable resource. Its framing as code is clear, but its presentation on a social site and its licensing under the GPL leave its use by other artists, whether programmers or not, open. It frustrates those of us who hoped to use code to draw a line in the sand by using code effectively as a social product and resource.

The creation of software that does nothing useful as a command-line tool is not comparable to too many artists’ technically incompetent use of medical equipment, mathematical equations or scientific theories as mere imagery in aesthetically competent artworks. Software has to run. Thayer’s Microcodes run, run correctly, and perform as specified.

A hacker and free software activist I know asked me what exactly makes the Microcodes code listings art (interestingly, they didn’t ask why they are code). I gave two reasons:

Firstly, the text of each program listing is short enough to be taken in as a single visual composition. When presented under the claim that they are art they therefore fall into the tradition of conceptual text-as-art. The tension between appearance and meaning that this implies is a live issue in art history and in art. There is an immediate and historical aestheticism or artistic-ness to the code.

Secondly, the behaviour of each program when it runs achieves no practical task as a command-line utility. It is therefore either useless or intended for some other purpose. The user must evaluate it using on their knowledge of what it does and how this relates to their experience of software. That is, on its aesthetics and iconography rather than on how it performs as a tool for some other external end.

This is exemplary code art. It makes strange the environment of the operating system and the command line. It creates an aesthetic representation, a meaningful resemblance in appearance but not function, of it in code as an object for contemplation. Microcodes has a balancing social component, but by being at its core unashamedly about code it allows that code to be about something of interest rather than the ostensive social or political content of the project just being an excuse to write code. This is code about the experience of being human in society in a time when being human in society is in no small part about the experience of code.

http://pallit.lhi.is/microcodes/

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Jorn Ebner’s “(sans femme et sans aviateur)” is an atmospheric time-based multi-window web-browser image work that presents an evocative exploration of contemporary Paris.

It consists of four series of pop-up browser web windows containing image slide shows which are programmatically arranged in turn on the desktop. The content of each window is static but animated by blurring or scrolling. The frames of the windows are also animated, being opened, closed and placed. Window choreography in net art has a long history, but there’s something subtle and satisfyingly compositional about Ebner’s windows. They are part of the flow of the story, or absence of story.

The build-up of windows on the desktop resembles the way that windows accumulate during the average computer user’s working day, only arranged with more intent and precision. Instead of word processor and spreadsheets or web pages and emails the windows present what looks as if it should be a narrative told using photographs of the streets, alleys and parks of contemporary Paris.

But there are no characters and nothing happens. It becomes obvious that the people who appear incidentally in the background of the images really are just people who appear incidentally in the background. There is no foreground. There is an absence of presence. This is alienating, like being a stranger in a unfamiliar big city.

I didn’t know precisely what was absent, though, not being familiar with Eric Rohmer’s film “The Aviator’s Wife” which the launch page for (sans femme et sans aviateur) explains is its inspiration. Would this familiarity improve the experience of the piece? It would definitely change it. But (sans femme et sans aviateur) is a very successful as an alienated portrayal of a city even without that extra point of reference. A viewer who does not spot the references to the film can still spot the references to Paris and to the haunted empty spaces of a modern city.

I did have to struggle with Firefox’s popup blocker to start the piece, but the instructions on its page at Turbulence explained what I needed to do. (sans femme et sans aviateur) uses Flash but it’s a mark of how far web technology has progressed since FutureSplash was first released that it could as easily be made entirely in JavaScript and HTML using the new “canvas” tag. This isn’t a technology demonstration, though, it is a work of art that uses technology to embody its aesthetic.

The wandering of a city guided by an incongruous text, especially if that city is Paris, evokes Situationism. (sans femme et sans aviateur) has the feel of a modern psychogeographic investigation, a tour of a city guided by a film rather than an inappropriate map. The measured pace of (sans femme et sans aviateur) allows it to deliver an increasingly strong feeling of immersion in its made-strange world. Repeated watching only increases this.

Whether as a homage to a film or as a psychologised depiction of urban space, (sans femme et sans aviateur) is worth taking the time to watch unfolding on your monitor. And to watch repeatedly, to let it draw you in. It is mature work of net art, relying not on visual or technical pyrotechnics but on the viewer’s visual competence to present a compelling meditation on the meanings we give to places.

(sans femme et sans aviateur)

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

The early experimental video art scene in Chicago, and its indispensability in developing an understanding of contemporary New Media practices, is something that I learned from jonCates and that jonCates learned from Phil Morton. Well, maybe it’s not quite that simple, but that is one possible set of connections that can be traced from jonCates’ COPY-IT-RIGHT project.

The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive was initiated in 2007 by jonCates and is housed in The Film, Video & New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It exists to organize and freely distribute Phil Morton’s new media artwork, and also to perpetuate the COPY-IT-RIGHT ideal that Morton advocated. As you can read on the blog for the COPY-IT-RIGHT project, Morton sought to disseminate an anti-copyright attitude towards media and its distribution, especially artwork that is based in digital technologies. By referencing these ideals under the phrase ‘COPY-IT-RIGHT’, Morton sought to completely replace ingrained notions of copyright law by re-framing the term’s meaning as a call to action. Make copies! It’s the right thing to do! jonCates states that COPY-IT-RIGHT ranges in meaning from copyright reform to pro-piracy. “The COPY-IT-RIGHT ethic is presented by Morton as a value, even as a moral imperative, to share and freely exchange media,” he said.

jonCates began researching Morton’s work shortly before he learned of Morton’s death from Jane Veeder, one of Morton’s collaborators. Veeder put him in contact with Morton’s surviving partner, Barb Abramo, who later entrusted all of Morton’s archived material to him. jonCates said that this took place after a couple years of correspondence and a developed understanding. The creation of the archive is, “a personal and subjective process that involves developing trust and friendships.”

The personal degrees of separation enabling this archive, however, should not betray it’s larger goal, which, according to jonCates, is to facilitate discourse. “This discursive work is intended to be productive, engendering the development of theory/practices that are informed by these archives and contributing to ongoing conversations,” he states. The archive is a central point of investigation, but also exists as a mediating voice within existing networks and issues, in both form and content. The intermingling of the archive’s personal and institutional roots is exemplary of how individual archives might begin to bridge recognized authority and the histories that are important to individuals.

Because COPY-IT-RIGHT is a project that seeks to freely distribute media art, as well as create a networked discourse around it, we are invited to explore ideas such as influence and the generative origins of our knowledge. This process eclipses antiquated visions of the archive as a static source of ‘knowledge’ or ‘history’.

COPY-IT-RIGHT’s latest web entry is a transcript of a talk jonCates gave at McGill University on anti-copyright approaches to media. In that talk, he refers to “the artistic role of archives”. jonCates provided some further examples of “artistic archives”, such as Emily Jacir’s Material for a Film and Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group, which both seek to illuminate history and contemporary contexts through materials that might not be automatically absorbed into our stateliest cultural institutions. They represent an independent approach to information collection, at the same time that they contain material that is itself a challenge to dominant cultural and historical knowledge. Likewise, COPY-IT-RIGHT is a lesser-voiced exploration of Chicago’s art history, but also an open-ended call to discuss and develop material on the future of media copyright attitudes.

The COPY-IT-RIGHT project, as mentioned, also exists to provide entry into Morton’s media art, for study or copy. The work he did with Dan Sandin, creator of the Sandin Image Processor – an analog computer for video image processing. Morton and Sandin’s “Distribution Religion” is a project that documents the process of duplicating the Sandin Image Processor. Morton wanted to create a duplicate of the processor itself, and in the process, created an outline of the method for others. The documentation became part of the copying process, and also includes remarks on the COPY-IT-RIGHT ethic.

The Distribution Religion is archived on giorgiomagnanensi.com. Examining this document and reading its prefatory statements seem to get at the heart of COPY-IT-RIGHT’s significance. jonCates is interested in the fact that Morton and Sandin’s work “predates The Pirate Party, Free and Open Source Software, Creative Commons and/or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” Although most copyright initiatives are steeped in political and legal challenges, COPY-IT-RIGHT offers an inaugural stance on issues that are at the forefront of contemporary culture: interdisciplinary desires, open information, and the democratic malleability of our cultural memory.

We have come to expect that information is distributed, and available. But we don’t necessarily employ it for our own purposes with the intent of ‘copying’ it. But this is, in essence, a direct form of preservation. In a 2004 lecture, Florian Cramer cited a parallel between artists who step outside of copyright law, and the sciences. Scientists, he says, have mostly been free to use formulas and proofs in the generation of new discoveries. In this light ‘copying’ has now become synonymous with ‘usage’ and the natural role this plays in the development of ideas become even more obvious. COPY-IT-RIGHT, by existing as an explicitly anti-copyright project and by making Morton’s materials available for the generation of new works, aligns the idea of copying with progress rather than piracy or plagiarism. As jonCates states in his own lecture, the ethic “opposed private property, ownership and economic exploitation on the basis of technologies.” COPY-IT-RIGHT suggests that the availability of resources is, as jonCates puts it, “not simply for study, but also for creative cultural uses by artists.”

Having attended some of the exhibition events at Transmediale.09 Deep North, in Berlin over the weekend of 29th January to 1st February this year I write this article from the departure lounge of the Berlin Schonenfeld airport. A blast of cold arctic weather has enveloped the UK, leading to the cancellation of all flights in and out of Stanstead airport and provided me with some down time in which to reflect on the festival.

Transmediale.09 Deep North purports to construct an impression of the polar regions as a place that can be “imagined but never truly captured”. In seeking to move beyond prevailing notions of catastrophic environmental change and to examine its broader cultural consequences, the festival aims to adapt and explore creative technologies and point the way to political transformation and creative sustainability. Such lofty ambitions are commendable though how attainable they are through the engine of an arts festival remains to be seen. Furthermore the festival organisers can be in no doubt of the irony that the success of their event is largely predicated on the numbers of media arts professionals flying in from across Europe to consider such issues, and as such anyone making too strong an argument for political and social action might be construed of as a little hypocritical.

If the festival sets itself philosophical objectives that are difficult to achieve, then the works exhibited around Berlin as part of the event stand or fall on their own individual merits, their abilities to provoke thought and reflection, while the exhibitions in which they are showcased must provide a context for there inclusion and a link to the wider aims of the festival.

The main site at The House of World Cultures in the Tiergarten has been transformed into a “makeshift zone of cultural shelter” by the Berlin design group raumtaktik. Different works occupy the buildings foyer, some of its anterooms and it’s main exhibition space. The gallery charged a five euro fee for entry, while works in other parts of the building were freely accessible. There were guides on hand in all areas, but while most were helpful and allowed photography this was strictly limited to accredited press at the paying show. Whatever the intention was, this practice produced a hierarchical construct, with the works within the boundary of the paying show being effectively corralled off from those outside and thus somehow being given an authoritative stamp.

Overall the works exhibited in the paying show were less interesting than those displayed outside. This was with the exception of Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag’s Amundsen / l-landscape (which I was unable to photograph). This work required you to stand on a podium and don a pair of headphones while watching a video projection of a rain spattered watery scene. The footage for this was shot in Norway close to the home of Amundsen, the famous polar explorer. another aspect of the same exhibit was a huge block of ice, sitting on a board suspended from cables in space and illuminated by a heat lamp. Sensors fitted into the board picked up data from the melting block and this was digitised and fed-back to the viewer via their headphones. The ice produced the sound of a deluge, the soundtrack to the film making our experience of the whole work simultaneously deeply mediated and intensely poetic.

Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag – AMUNDSEN / I-landscape (de, 2009). Photo: Jonathan Granger

Other works within the House of World Cultures but outside the paying exhibition that were of note included; Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Telephone Trottoire, a project which enables the worldwide Congolese community to reformulate a form of traditional communication via networked technology. The work, which won this years jury prize had a material, almost sculptural quality, made manifest through its use of redundant analogue telephone exchange equipment. “For ‘Telephone Trottoir’, we recorded twenty short monologues or clips focusing on life both in the UK and back home in the DRC. These clips were intended to pose questions, impart information, highlight factual events, and to provoke the listener into making a comment or just to think about their lives and the future of the Congolese community in the UK. All stories and dialogue were recorded and played back in Lingala/French, which meant that listeners were much more inclined to accept the calls and participate in the project.”[1]

Graham Hardwood, Richard Wright, Matsuko Yokokoji (uk) Telephone Trottoire -Tantalum Memorial (2008)

Petko Dourmana’s Post Global Warming Survival Kit is an installation inviting the audience to explore it in a darkened space with night vision headsets. Ready to be discovered inside the space were projections of a bleak, featureless landscape and a small mobile caravan which you were able to enter and survey. Set up as an imaginary post apocalyptic world in which human vision has adapted to the nuclear winter, the experience of the work is deeply unsettling, requiring the audience to use their sense of sight to somehow ‘feel’ their way around the space. “Confrontation with the bare necessities for survival provided by Dourmana quickly makes viewers aware that more is needed than mere material goods to ensure emotional survival as well. In his post-apocalyptic world, Dourmana allows viewers to experience other visual worlds or aspects of our reality that are invisible without the aid of high-tech devices. Without technology, we would be blind in his world.”[2]

Petko Dourmana – Post Global Warming Survival Kit. Photo: Petko Dourmana

There are of course many other partner organisations involved in a festival as large as this, with many other workshops and exhibitions taking place at fringe venues and it is here that much of the more interesting experimentation takes place. Club Transmediale in particular offered interesting content, with groups such as Bank of Common Knowledge providing inspirational support to those interested in collaborative production practices and soundmuseum.fm an audio repository.

The Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, another partner venue in the festival provides a site for an ambitious architectural project. Corpora In Si(gh)te Architecture as an environmental, spatial measuring machine presents several projected video screens that map in real-time the flows and eddy’s of air currents around the building. Data is gathered through a mesh network set up in the vicinity of the building and presented within it as a form in a state of constant flux.

In the UK the weather used to be a safe subject for conversation, people could discuss it without the need to make cultural references, and thus revealed little about themselves, or their backgrounds, it was a subject upon which you were allowed to disagree. All this has changed, as global warming becomes climate change, the traditional late January cold snap for which we are totally unprepared takes on other overtones. While on the one hand there is a temptation to dismiss much of what is argued as our effect on the planet as humanist arrogance, the ethical questions of how we behave and act still require more exploration.

I am now stranded at Dublin airport en rout to the UK, the battery on my laptop about to give out, while an almighty snow storm rages across Western Europe. At times like this The Deep North seems much less an abstract concept and much more a hard reality, to be weathered, and dealt with as best we can, as we are jolted out of our everyday lazy reliance on our global communications infrastructures and our perceived ability to somehow exist outside of ‘nature’ is distinctly thrown into question.

[1]WHY TELEPHONE TROTTOIRE?
http://www.tantalumexploration.net/pages/trottoirehistory.php

[2]Text by Sabine Himmelsbach Artistic Director of Edith Russ House for Media Art.
http://www.dourmana.com/node/104

SwanQuake: House
igloo (Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli)
v22 Ashwin Street
Thursday October 16, 2008 to Monday November 3, 2008

Igloo’s “Summerbranch” was an ultra-detailed virtual reality environment depicting a woodland landscape populated by incorporeal dancing figures as day changed to night. Their new work “House”, the first part of the ongoing “SwanQuake” project, has an urban setting but it is is no less uncanny. As installed at v22 Ashwin Street the realisation and presentation of House continues and intensifies some of the most successful aspects of Summerbranch.

House features the penthouse apartment of the title overlooking a stormy street, the stairwell of an apartment block, the tunnels of a Tube station, and more fantastic elements such as a burnt-out tube train that leads to a portal to hell. Occasionally, ghostly female figures dance endlessly through graceful choreography trapped in time and space.

The darkly lit corridors, tunnels and rooms rendered by a first-person shooter (FPS) game engine and haunted by impersonal ghostly figures immediately call to mind the survival horror genre. There’s an unsettling feel to the environment, even when the feeling of threat gives way to a sense of wonder in the underground warehouse filled with joyfully dancing figures.

The gritty realism of stairwell and underground are joined to House’s more fantastic elements almost casually. Hell, the underground hangar and rocky tunnels lead to and from the haunted almost reality closer to the surface. One element that hangs between the real and the unreal it the burnt out tube train that brought the terror attack on the tube of 2005, or further back the damage of the Blitz, to mind. But the Tube station sign reads “Fackin Ell”.

House is rendered using the proprietary FPS game engine “Unreal Engine”, despite SwanQuake’s title reference to a more famous FPS game engine. The dancing figures are animated from motion capture data taken from real dancers.

On a technical level, the modelling of the environments and the smooth motion of the animated figures is superb. This technical competence marks igloo’s work out aesthetically compared to the shaky, performance-destroying motion capture of Hollywood movies and compared to the limitations of combat games that must balance the complexity of environments with the complexity of network-controlled player character and monster models. Control of the medium is vital for expression, and igloo demonstrate this.

On a conceptual level, there is something about taking the aesthetics of dance and real-time 3D games as a point of departure that reverses the aestheticization of the bodily movement of violence through technology of the Matrix films or the fragmenting body horror of FPS and survival games that is so prevalent in popular culture. Dance is a grammar of living bodies, shooting games are the choreography of dying bodies. SwanQuake achieves a critical distance from a pervasive and important part of contemporary popular culture in this way that many artists are happy to ironise only for nostalgia or shock value.

Summerbranch was presented as video projections on walls in a darkened gallery, with the track-ball controls on podiums on the floor. House has a more modest scale but a unique means of presentation. A wide screen on a wooden dresser or desk, with the trackball and buttons set into its surface. It looks like a bedroom Memex, Vannevar Bush’s imagined prototype knowledge work device that would have been a desk with a microfiche reader built in. It provides a domestic frame for House even in the gallery space, taking control of the presentation and interaction with the virtual environment. This is a successful solution to some of the issues of how exactly to display new media art in a gallery. And it’s great fun to use, if even more prone to producing motion sickness than Summerbranch.

Igloo’s environments are site-specific in a way that is surprising for VR. Summerbranch was developed at Artsway Gallery in the New Forest and depicts an area of that forest. House depicts Igloo’s own apartment and the gallery that it is being exhibited in among its other elements. It’s a shock to realize that you have wandered in the game into the gallery that you are physically stood in.

The gallery, the real gallery, includes elements of the game in return. The lighting of the gallery has been carefully set low, and at first you might not notice that some parts of the wall next to the desk in the first room is not actually brick but is actually bitmaps of bricks printed on vinyl and mounted on panels. The second room has an entire wall replaced with a bitmap.

The textures are from the game engine representation of the gallery and have the slightly contrasty, mach-banded, pixelated but smoothed and blurred look of compressed photographically derived bitmaps. At first, they look real, then a sneaking suspicion is followed by the shock of realization that they are unreal. The show is structured as a linear series of environments that increase the real space’s unreality and the virtual space’s reality each time.

Between the second and last rooms in the real gallery is a darkened corridor that screams “survival horror FPS”. At one end of it an oval mirror frame surrounds a projection of a scene from the VR version of a corridor, slowly moving (Igloo tell me that it is seen from the point of view of one of the dancers). A single bare light bulb, reflected in the projection, hangs at the other end. There’s an unsettling feedback between the real and the unreal.

The final room has only its ceiling and floor uncovered. Printed bitmap panels completely cover the walls. It’s a shock to realize that they are unreal. It is as if you have passed through the mirror in the corridor. One of the bitmaps is a reflection of the one opposite; even the light switch is a texture map. Returning to the other rooms and using the virtual environment again is a different experience after this crescendo of tension between reality and virtuality.

House is a more difficult virtual environment to navigate than Summerbranch. I missed entire areas, including, vitally, the gallery, and I couldn’t steer the camera through the door to the penthouse. The competence of the viewer is always a variable in the experience of art, but interactive multimedia makes this explicit and a matter of the practical performance of the viewer. Seeing the real and projected light bulb-lit corridors without seeing the gallery in the virtual environment was unsettling. But having seen the corridor in the environment was head-spinning. Is it unfair that some viewers will miss this, or is it just a technological reflection of the fact that every viewer will experience every artwork differently modulated by their competences? House exposes these issues in a way that the more open environment of Summerbranch didn’t so such a degree.

The relationship between reality, representation and unreality is at the core of the installation of House, expressed through a tangent to the aesthetics of one of the paradigmatic embodiments of that relationship: FPS games and the other of its hyper-masculine body choreographies and Bond Villain fantasy architecture. This remains a key part of the experience of contemporary culture. igloo’s effective combination of real and virtual space embodies and opens it up. It is a satisfying spectacle in itself, and it rewards extended viewing and reflection.

SwanQuake: House
igloo (Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli)
v22 Ashwin Street
Thursday October 16, 2008 to Monday November 3, 2008

Igloo’s “Summerbranch” was an ultra-detailed virtual reality environment depicting a woodland landscape populated by incorporeal dancing figures as the day changed to night. Their new work, “House”, the first part of the ongoing “SwanQuake” project, has an urban setting, but it is no less uncanny. As installed at v22 Ashwin Street, the realisation and presentation of House continues and intensifies some of the most successful aspects of Summerbranch.

House features the penthouse apartment of the title overlooking a stormy street, the stairwell of an apartment block, the tunnels of a Tube station, and more fantastic elements such as a burnt-out tube train that leads to a portal to hell. Occasionally, ghostly female figures dance endlessly through graceful choreography trapped in time and space.

The darkly lit corridors, tunnels and rooms rendered by a first-person shooter (FPS) game engine and haunted by impersonal ghostly figures immediately call the survival horror genre to mind. The environment has an unsettling feel, even when the feeling of threat gives way to a sense of wonder in the underground warehouse filled with joyfully dancing figures.

The gritty realism of the stairwell and underground are joined to House’s more fantastic elements almost casually. The underground hangar and rocky tunnels lead to and from the haunted reality closer to the surface. One element that hangs between the real and the unreal is the burnt-out tube train that brought the terror attack on the tube of 2005, or further back the damage of the Blitz, to mind. But the Tube station sign reads “Fackin Ell”.

House is rendered using the proprietary FPS game engine “Unreal Engine”, despite SwanQuake’s title referencing a more famous FPS game engine. The dancing figures are animated from motion capture data taken from real dancers.

Technically, the environment’s modelling and the animated figures’ smooth motion are superb. This technical competence marks igloo’s work out aesthetically compared to the shaky, performance-destroying motion capture of Hollywood movies and compared to the limitations of combat games that must balance the complexity of environments with the complexity of network-controlled player characters and monster models. Control of the medium is vital for expression, and igloo demonstrates this.

On a conceptual level, there is something about taking the aesthetics of dance and real-time 3D games as a point of departure that reverses the aestheticization of the bodily movement of violence through the technology of the Matrix films or the fragmenting body horror of FPS and survival games that is so prevalent in popular culture. Dance is a grammar of living bodies, and shooting games are the choreography of dying bodies. SwanQuake achieves a critical distance from a pervasive and important part of contemporary popular culture in this way that many artists are happy to ironise only for nostalgia or shock value.

Summerbranch was presented as video projections on walls in a darkened gallery, with the track-ball controls on podiums on the floor. House has a more modest scale but a unique means of presentation. A widescreen on a wooden dresser or desk, with the trackball and buttons set into its surface. It looks like a bedroom Memex, Vannevar Bush’s imagined prototype knowledge work device that would have been a desk with a built-in microfiche reader. It provides a domestic frame for House, even in the gallery space, taking control of the presentation and interaction with the virtual environment. This is a successful solution to some of the issues of how exactly to display new media art in a gallery. And it’s great fun to use, if even more prone to producing motion sickness than Summerbranch.

Igloo’s environments are site-specific in a way that is surprising for VR. Summerbranch was developed at Artsway Gallery in the New Forest and depicts an area of that forest. House depicts Igloo’s apartment and the gallery it is being exhibited in, among its other elements. It’s a shock to realize that you have wandered into the game into the gallery that you are physically standing in.

The gallery, the real gallery, includes elements of the game in return. The lighting of the gallery has been carefully set low, and at first, you might not notice that some parts of the wall next to the desk in the first room is not actually brick but are actually bitmaps of bricks printed on vinyl and mounted on panels. The second room has an entire wall replaced with a bitmap.

The textures are from the game engine representation of the gallery and have the slightly contrasty, mach-banded, pixelated but smoothed and blurred look of compressed photographically derived bitmaps. At first, they look real, then a sneaking suspicion is followed by the shock of the realization that they are unreal. The show is structured as a linear series of environments that increase the real space’s unreality and the virtual space’s reality each time.

Between the second and last rooms in the real gallery is a darkened corridor that screams “survival horror FPS”. At one end of it, an oval mirror frame surrounds a projection of a scene from the VR version of a corridor, slowly moving (Igloo tell me that it is seen from the point of view of one of the dancers). A single bare light bulb, reflected in the projection, hangs at the other end. There’s an unsettling feedback between the real and the unreal.

The final room has only its ceiling and floor uncovered. Printed bitmap panels completely cover the walls. It’s a shock to realize that they are unreal. It is as if you have passed through the mirror in the corridor. One of the bitmaps is a reflection of the one opposite. Even the light switch is a texture map. Returning to the other rooms and using the virtual environment again is a different experience after this crescendo of tension between reality and virtuality.

House is a more difficult virtual environment to navigate than Summerbranch. I missed entire areas, including, vitally, the gallery, and I couldn’t steer the camera through the door to the penthouse. The competence of the viewer is always a variable in the experience of art, but interactive multimedia makes this explicit and a matter of the practical performance of the viewer. Seeing the real and projected light bulb-lit corridors without seeing the gallery in the virtual environment was unsettling. But having seen the corridor in the environment was head-spinning. Is it unfair that some viewers will miss this or is it just a technological reflection of the fact that every viewer will experience every artwork differently modulated by their competences? House exposes these issues in a way that the more open environment of Summerbranch didn’t so such a degree.

The relationship between reality, representation and unreality is at the core of the installation of House, expressed through a tangent to the aesthetics of one of the paradigmatic embodiments of that relationship; FPS games and the other of its hyper-masculine body choreographies and Bond Villain fantasy architecture. This remains a key part of the experience of contemporary culture. igloo’s effective combination of real and virtual space embodies and opens it up. It is a satisfying spectacle in itself, and it rewards extended viewing and reflection.

https://gibsonmartelli.com/swanquake-the-user-manual/

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Peter Moertenboeck / Helge Mooshammer (eds.): “Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space.” NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2008.

In 2005 Peter Moertenboeck and Helge Mooshammer initiated the Networked Cultures project, a research platform on the potential of translocally networked spatial practices. Interviews, exhibitions, films and presentations are the many forms they collaborate on architecture, art and theory projects and investigate urban network processes, spaces of geocultural crises, and forms of cultural participation and self-determination. Based at Goldsmiths College this project investigates the cultural transformations in Europe through examining the potentials and effects of networked spatial practices. The project interacts with art, architectural and urban practices across Europe and beyond to look at ways in which “contested spaces” allow for a multi-inhabitation of territories and narratives across cultural, social or geographic boundaries.

Sites of alternative urban engagement are collected on a database which serves as a growing archive for research into emerging architectural cultures, including projects such as United We Stand – Europe has a mission, by Eva and Franco Mattes, the Trans European Picnic, organised by the New Media Center_kuda.org and V2_Institute of the Unstable Media, or projects like Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar by the Spanish collective Hackitectura. In the following interview Peter Moertenboeck and Helge Mooshammer talk about the network as “the digital age’s ubiquitous object of desire”, the presentational form of socio-politically engaged creative projects and their own creative processes, defined as a “practice without discipline”.

Which are the smallest and the broadest networks you are engaged with?

Networks are highly complex assemblages that enmesh our feelings, thought and action with speculations about an ever-expanding elasticity in terms of cultural involvement, ranging from intimate exchanges to globally orchestrated forms of articulation. From one-on-one networks to the worldwide social movements of our time, each of these networks is presumed to be able to expand or retract in accordance with the urgencies of any given situation. So it is due to an inherent element of myth and fiction and due to the multiplication of such currencies by network actors that the absolute size of networks is indeterminable. In many respects, our research on relational structures and our own engagement in a variety of networked spatial practices has equally remained unconcerned about the empiricist doctrines of determinable quantity and scale. This disregard of determinate dimensions can be traced back to the very nature of the structures and the kind of practices that have been at the heart of our activities in the first place: emerging networks in the field of art and the wider cultural, political and intellectual ecologies they are embedded in.

That said, it needs to be noted that the breadth of any type of organisation is not necessarily linked to the complexity of actions it can perform, nor does it reveal anything about the quality of communications that help to sustain it. If we look at globally dispersed corporate organisations, for instance, their logistics and the globalising connectivity they bring into action may differ significantly from environmental groups or human rights activism operating at a similar degree of pervasiveness. This has to do with the fact that for networks form is not a given. It is a retractable instantiation of what could be or what could be done at any moment in time. This form is best reflected in the potentiality produced by a variable and instantaneous grouping together of different interests. Such is the flexible shape of informal trade routes or the recent upheaval and rioting of citizens in the centre of Athens. Their protest does not draw on a finite and localised number of contributors but on a translocally disaggregated potentiality which could be reaggregated and forced into action because of the shock of distinct events.

As perpetual transformation is a key characteristic of network structures, it has become part of the politics of most networks not to give away their actual ultimate strength. What many people find so attractive with regard to network organisation is precisely this clandestine character: The way networks disseminate information, the way they obfuscate the ins and outs of participation, the way their operations change direction and new forms of cohesion suddenly arise. All this can be attractive for many different reasons. One reason of course is that it allows for a widening of the sphere of cultural participation. And this is not about a range of choices that are on offer. It is about the way in which the lack of centrality and clarity – in other words a high level of structural and content-related indeterminacy – allows for the production of one’s own terms of taking part.

A case in point is the network that originated around the so-called Lost Highway Expedition in 2006 – an experimental gathering in which several hundred people participated and that brought together a multitude of individuals, groups and institutions in the nine different regions spanned by the expedition along the unfinished “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” in former Yugoslavia. The idea of the self-organised, collective undertaking was to reclaim the conflicted territory of the Western Balkans as a platform for new cultural practices. When we participated in the expedition as part of our research, none of us felt obliged to collaborate or stay together for any length time, and yet dozens of projects have emerged and new connectivities have been created. Undoubtedly, this form of participation differs from the way one can participate in the more purpose oriented networks we are involved in, such as the European Biennial network, which connects a range of ten European biennials of diverse profiles, or the Curry Stone Prize fellowship, which aims to promote design projects or innovative ideas that contribute positively to living circumstances for broad sections of global humanity. Still, one can find a whole gamut of indexed moments, in which the potentiality that rests in one network structure crosses over to a different network and certain registers of participation become compatible with one another. The potentiality embodied by an individual and the impregnable potentiality of a thought thus never cease to spark off aberrations and odd penetrations of order. They always constitute what one might call ‘potential networks’.

In the book “Networked Cultures” you describe, amongst others, the network as “the digital age’s ubiquitous object of desire” promising “a flexibilisation of our relationships and an expansion of our possibilities.” Is this still utopian?

It would be easy to argue that the utopia of the network, just like any other kind of utopia, has been doomed to failure as it has been corrupted by the regimes of postmodernity or the aggression of late capitalism or other global currents and everything that comes with it. But instead of dismissing the frail concept of utopia completely, we could try to reroute and align it with the potentiality embedded in the present, amidst the everyday manifestation of social and cultural phenomena. This way utopia would be rendered less the idealised product of a distant future than a form of communicative praxis that draws on the potentiality of the present. Of course, this brings up the question as to how we actually handle our objects of desire: What happens, if desire suddenly turns into fear? If, for instance, the buzz created around an object of desire is taken hostage by an enemy or when it gets detached from its initial arena of signification and moves on to a less consensual field of societal activity, to do with disease, crime, catastrophy or terror? Such shifts highlight the ambivalences of utopian ideas, rendering them far more contradictory objects of both desire and contention.

The treacherous nature of utopias is perhaps not due to the ill conception of their original ideas, but rather to the finality of the reality resulting from such shifts of political and cultural esteem. In particular, the manner in which the centres of late capitalist power have perceived the network has changed. Once viewed as a tool of trouble-free control, it is now feared as a source of uncontrollable danger. In this regard, networks have replaced the most powerful figure of modernity: the threatening figure of the masses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Elias Canetti’s concept of the masses as a symbol of being touched by the unknown has given way to a trope of being connected with the unknown. Increased mobility, accelerated contacts and the declining relevance of spatial distance – as an expression of our sense of proximity and distance – have allowed new parameters to emerge and generated not only a new connective quality, but also elements of uncertainty and fear: fear of the unchecked spread of global epidemics, fear of terrorist networks and fear of a profound social, financial and governmental crisis in the old centre of world power.

The network has become a diffuse symbol of the enemy, one encrusted with fears – just as diffuse – of disintegration, transmission and contamination. In the widespread talk of a ‘war on terrorism’, the network has become a useful tool to give fear a place. Of infinite scope, this place can be experienced everywhere – which is why it must also be reorganised, monitored and protected everywhere by political leaders. Fear has become the ultimate mobilising principle in a ‘global’ society void of overt political struggle. The use of the ‘network’ concept and the myths of its all-pervasiveness thus cleverly disguise a global policy of expert administration that attempts to control network dynamics on the one hand but must provide space for its expansion on the other to uphold its mobilising powers and to achieve its own goals.

“Networked Cultures” treats Media and Internet-based Art in the same way as it deals with Architecture, Visual Arts and social projects. Is the notion to integrate different artistic practices with the aim to expand the space paradigm or does the choice of projects arise from the topics you are dealing with?

Our point of departure is the spatial logics maintained by the realities of a post-national world as they are produced and lived out on the ground. Architects, artists and media practitioners are some of the actors in this convoluted field where they are joined by many other actors and interests. Through what they produce they act as catalysts of possible configurations of space, substance, people and communication. They disclose possibilities for alternate sets of relations to evolve. This is why amidst the claims for a global sphere of connectivity between multiple incompatible domains art plays an important role in positing new horizons and in opening up a world for meaningful cultural engagement. So it is essentially these practices and projects themselves rather than their conceptual framings which expand the paradigms of spatial production and experience.

Today, an ever growing percentage of cultural production takes place outside the officially designated channels – outside the institutions, protocols and technologies that have been developed and authorised as a way of productively engaging in culture. Of course this is not an isolated phenomenon. It happens in response to the growing instabilities and deregulations in society at large, in response to a climate in which new forms of economic, societal and state organisation evolve and spread globally to an extent at which each of us is affected by these changes in their own forms of embeddedness.

We are not dealing here only with an expanded realm of artistic work or with the overlapping of different sectors of creative spatial production. Something else is at stake: a vital charateristics of our ‘globalised’ world. This world does not exist in a single form. It is a proliferating set of conditions, furnished with all sorts of spatial products that make up parallel worlds with different territorial demands, conflict zones, relays, intermediaries, strategists, boundary regimes, and so on. Any encounter between these different worlds could nurture opportunities for co-operative engagement, but the difficulty lies with finding the right instruments to maintain these instable spaces of mediation.

On closer examination, though, what is provoked on many different levels by what we term ‘networked cultures’ is nothing less than a range of circulations between different practices that are not referring to one another through centrally authorised categories – a well-grounded discipline, a solid institution, a common history, a particular geography or the concept of the nation state – but through the way they collaborate to address real urgencies and create platforms of participation in the sphere of culture. Here it is the flow of interactions and not some legitimising point of origin that sets something in place to gradually gain momentum. That way, networked cultures shift our attention in critical spatial practice from constituting categories to processes of constitution, from stable spatial characteristics to emergent properties of spaces, from the production of objects to the production of relationalities.

One of the dilemmas of (socio-)politically motivated forms of art is the fact that it rarely addresses those who should be addressed. Do you think that the shift of the presentational form of projects – combined with an aesthetic value for the spectators – could lead to a broader distribution and mediation of the contents?

The vision articulated by this extended field of architecture, art and media practices cannot but bring to mind the whole spectrum of collectivised civic engagement aimed to counteract the logics of global capital and its political back-up – urban social movements or human rights activism, to name but two. The conflation of these realms is not only potentially productive for either side, it is also transformative. In very broad terms, art can be seen as a laboratory landscape in which one can invent all sorts of self-produced devices: tools for communication, tools for inhabitation, tools for representation. However ephemeral or vulnerable these tools may seem, they are highly instrumental in adding provisional support, creating sudden discontinuities or yielding unpatterned forms of access. Such acts of denormalisation are an important disposition to loosen the boundaries of knowledge in a world centred around an insatiable politics of inclusions and exclusions.

The Paris based Campement Urbain collective is one of several practices which have sucessfully managed to induce a mix of art, propaganda, city policies and social relationships in the landscape of urban normality. Manipulating the context prescribed for urban renewal, their long-term Je&Nous project breaks up the boundaries between the inhabitants of a multi-ethnic district, local authorities and planners, not just by advocating a transgression of planning routines on the zero level of politics but by jointly exposing the risks and possibilities of building a communal structure: Who decides on its design? Who controlls access? Who takes responsibilty for its maintenance? Rejecting singular logics associated with the perfect organisation of such a place, Campement Urbain encouraged the myths and fictions that enable a community to emerge and those in which a community continues to exist. Importantly, work on this project has not been contained by the confines of its physical location in Sevran-Beaudottes near Paris. It has been presented and discussed at many international events and exhibitions, thus raising awareness for the collapse of top-down policies of containment, as well as offering a model for self-authorised participation and citizenry.

One of the most memorable aspects with regard to changing perceptual regimes is that networks don’t simply represent an environment but actively create it. Armed with instruments of change, they excel in projecting and multiplying webs of continual communication. The Je&Nous project has been put into circulation on a variety of different levels, including continuous discussions and gatherings of residents, a multitude of collective actions, the project’s crucial contribution to the Venice Biennale, or Jacques Ranciere’s reference to the project in his lecture/essay on ‘The Politics of Art and its Paradoxes.’ Each of these levels offers a variety of interdependent entry points for contributors, which is why changes on one level may affect the anatomy of organisation on another level. This is the space of transformation, the space of chafed stratifications, the space of unforseen externalities that cannot be realigned. And it is precisely here, at the point where this space – in a constant reshuffling of alignments – opens up to multiple logics that the aesthetic value of a project like Je&Nous is both generated and disseminated.

Reasoning the “linguistic turn” from the 1970s, is your project settled within the so called “spatial turn” which was brought on a global level at the end of the 1980s? Where is the theoretical basis for your research on the multiple phenomena of “Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space”?

Wide-spread recognition of such cultural turns and their interpretative strategies, be it linguistic, spatial, educational or participatory ones, has always effected a flood of attempts to define the ins and outs of these particular turns, furnishing the horizon on which an engagement in culture takes place with all sorts of rules and imperatives and emulations, instead of aiming to keep up the active moment created by unregulated critical engagement. That’s why we are a bit wary of attempts to categorise our work with regard to such frameworks. Locating network structures in the arts as a mode of engagement in the world that cannot be anything but political, a key challenge for them today is the way in which they negotiate their role in the development of new forms of cultural participation.

Our theoretical approach is thus less committed to the confines of a particular turn than to the workings of an ungrounding that lies at the heart of these very practices. In other words, it is along the lines of network practice itself that our research is oriented towards disruptions, interventions and fragmentations, and towards the emergent properties that arise from the interactions of various network components. We also try to take on board the fact that these components are likewise highly unstable and shaped by the interactions they are immersed in. Most of all, as our research aims to participate in building up unsolicited networks which design their own processes, the conceptual and analytic tools have to be developed in close exchange with this building process. Of course one has to do a lot of roadwork oneself, but the real benefit of opening up research that way lies in developing a shared basis through practice which might allow for more differentiated views on the production of theoretical frameworks.

When engaging with creative practices we are particularly keen to find out if and how they not only reflect back on existing networks of governance, but how through their work they produce minor transgressions and mutations which shake up the existing order and create something new. Much of the discourse in the Western art world in the late 20th century has been caught up in institutional critique, yet critical interventions of such kind are now felt to be considered too narrowly, given that today’s field of intervention accrues from transnational challenges operating outside the boundaries of institutional frameworks. We are rather faced with the interaction of an array of incomplete and provisional systems that increasingly bypass the vertical links around which institutions tended to be built previously. The most important question is: How do such networks manage to mark out a socio-spatial process whose properties emerge from a situation rather than being solely tied to local or historical restrictions?

Nevertheless you turn away from your background in Architecture and Theory; you describe your working methods as “a practice without discipline”. Aren’t the discourse and the context you are pushing ahead with the discipline itself?

Certainly, one of the challenges of our endeavour lies in producing an account on a subject in formation without either formalising it through particular framings or allowing it to escape any form of critical evaluation by way of naturalising it. What follows is that the space constituted by the discourse, of which our project itself is a vital part, needs to be subject to critical interrogation as are all the entities populating this space. This is not an easy task, especially when you need to make decisions that affect different lines of action, and one has to maintain a certain level of awareness for the risks of such an approach.

Trying to operate within the dynamics of network formations instead of analysing networks from without, our working method is a parallel process of cultural practice and analytic reflection, and perhaps, this parallelism also reflects a degree of concurrency in our present cultural climate. What really strikes us as the pre-eminent characteristic of our contemporary situation is an all-encompassing elasticity of cultural belonging. Most notably, cultures have become subject to a shift from a universal rootedness in territories, disciplines and institutions to a more performative set of socialities and spatialities which are only loosely interlinked yet continuously overlapping and obscuring one another. The boundaries that normally provoke and regulate the collective production of critical work have become fragmented to a degree that it is now impossible to distinguish between inside and outside in traditional binary terms.

This is not to be confused with axiomatic erosion and weakening of boundary regimes. The realities we experience are in fact infused with an active obfuscation and concealment of power structures; they are transformed by an increasing dematerialisation and flexibilisation of the various apparatuses managing spatial distribution and production. So there is a real urgency to develop new vocabularies and new forms of articulation that match up to the complexities of the new organisational matrix of our lives. Under these conditions the production of ‘artistic devices’, as Brian Holmes has called the elaborate experimental settings through which contemporary art practices act as catalysts of unforeseen relations and possibilities, offers a form of access to the changing modalities of societal formation: Self-organised camps and expeditions, informal gatherings, autonomous education programmes, makeshift architectural structures, counter-summits and cultural networks are the corresponding contemporary tools. They are focal points that temporarily create spheres of a collectivised critical engagement.

In a situation where the predominant mode of production is not division and confinement but multiplication and mobilisation, these artistic practices propel a multiplicity of entanglements on different levels. They complicate the existing structures rather than abstracting a purified model. What this entails, though, is that not only the artistic position but also the position of everyone and anyone becomes highly unstable, raising the question of how we can draw upon network resources and network capacities to create zones of autonomy within an all-consuming culturalisation of the global economy.

Both of you are not only researchers, but also part of the different networks you are theoretically dealing with. Isn’t this a problematic role with too much involvement? Or is this behaviour integral part of your research?

Drifting in and out of various roles is a crucial mode of interaction for participants in networks. The drift allows you to explore different opportunities and epistemic constellations as you experiment with a changing set of relational structures. That way the creation of alternate relationship patterns provokes knowledge to evolve that would not appear otherwise. The same goes for academic research which in a situation of radical ambiguity actively seeks to provoke opaque operations to reveal themselves. Rather than using the network as a testing ground for a priori assumptions, you interact with the network in order to learn about its potential.

Coming back to our previous example of the Lost Highway Expedition, participants in this collective investigation were deliberately left to define their own projects, plan their own time and make their own contacts. The concept of swarming perhaps best describes the way in which knowledge of the expedition spread, the way the vaguely delimited groups moved from section to section, converged again and subsequently disseminated the knowledge generated during their journeys in different and only partly interconnected projects – exhibitions, seminars, workshops and publications. What enabled the socio-aesthetic experiment to become more than a self-referential group experience was the space of action that was generated by the collaboration of the project’s initiators and that absorbed new actors and formulated an expanded political space. The artistic projects produced during and in the wake of the expedition form archives of knowledge that in turn allow for an extension of the expedition beyond those involved in situ.

While an external observer of this process would have struggled to grasp the dynamics of how transient alliances were formed around project ideas and how these ideas developed and spread along the route, direct involvement in the expedition allowed for gaining first-hand experience of all the minor moves and nudges, the tacit knowledge and the emergent results of local interactions. This kind of knowledge production does not limit its own scope by opting to apply the most elaborate and consensual methodological canon. It favours the principle of good enough, which is in fact a common protocol of software and systems design to enable a system to evolve and gain complexity as it goes along. Despite potential inaccuracies due to one’s own involvement, the benefit of this approach lies in focussing on what is gained in a network process rather than contemplating its formal weaknesses and failures.

What are the future plans for “Networked Cultures”?

Commonplace tropes of geocultural transformation such as urban migrant quarters, diasporic communities, and refugee settlements no longer suffice for understanding the shifting patterns of global socio-spatial organisation. Instead, we need to pay more attention to conditions and technologies that emerge from an ongoing transformation of citizenship arrangements and to the ways in which networked cultures exercise forms of societal involvement that advance our current conception of political and societal participation. Having studied the dynamics of contemporary art and urban networks in terms of network creativity and relational agency, we are now embarking on a series of further examinations of the enmeshments of art, architecture and politics that use culture as a radical dispositive to produce their own referential systems for social encounters and material expressions. In collaboration with various partners we are going to install a series of ‘research platforms’ of collective knowledge production, which will focus on specific questions of civil society, network transformation and intercultural competence. While it may be claimed that today’s global dynamics unhamperedly impinge on the local plane, studying the micro level of network projects, in turn, addresses the much larger quest for new forms of political engagement in a world of global connectivity.

–

About Peter Moertenboeck and Helge Mooshammer
Peter Moertenboeck is professor of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology and Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths College (London) with a focus on spatial conflicts, urban informality, modeld of networking and relational theories. Helge Mooshammer is director of the research project “Relational Architecture” at the Vienna University of Technology and has been Research Fellow at the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies (IFK, Vienna) in 2008.

The Sound of eBay completes UBERMORGEN.COM’s trilogy that also includes Amazon Noir and Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI)(1). In order to understand the significance of this work, a brief look at recent Net.Art history is helpful.

Net.Art 1.0 –> ???

Net.Art has always faced challenges: attracting attention, finding a place (and surviving) in an art world focused on salable objects. Those have to do mainly with reception, but at least as early as 1999, problems with what was being produced were recognized when Alex Galloway stated that “Net-dot-art is dead” and cited Tilman Baumgartel announcing it was the end of an era. In 2001, Baumgartel published net.art 2.0, a collection of interviews that, among other things, speculate about what the next generation of net.art might be. (2) In 2002, Florian Cramer played a small trick on the Nettime list by posting excerpts from a 1989 communication between himself and Neoist Jon Berndt, calling for an Art Strike as the best response to the impoverishment of mail art but editing the re-post to comment on net.art. Five years later, Guthrie Lonergan made a chart outlining the aesthetics of hacking vs. those of “defaults” which he published on his blog in early 2007. Notably, many of the characteristics (excerpted below) refer implicitly or explicitly to net.art:

(3).

In an interview with Sher Doruff during the summer of 2008 about the state-of-the-art of new media, Net.Art, and so on, she expressed the view that this genre was facing a crisis. She felt that artists were, in a sense, paralyzed precisely because the tools made widespread in the evolution of Web 2.0 are so easy to use so that artists became too conditioned by this and could not imagine alternatives (4). Perhaps not everyone would agree that artists have been paralyzed or that it is difficult to imagine alternatives to defaults, but Web 2.0 technologies have certainly impacted all user expectations. Perhaps beyond anything else, we take for granted easy connections and easy, reliable applications to share text, images, audio or video files, and above all, mash-ups.

Considering this partial context, the Sound of eBay seems far more significant than it might at first glance. In this project, we see the artists’ efforts to get beyond the merely subversive, superficially interactive, and aesthetically crude work that typified earlier Net.Art. However, I decided to actually ask UBERMORGEN.COM member Hans Bernhard what they had been aiming to do:

After our GWEI and Amazon Noir projects were perceived as critical and political projects (tackling issues such as Google Advertisement system and earnings – the core of Google and Amazon book-selling platform and related Copyright issues), we just felt the urge to do something nice, to show that we are not interested in bold statements and smart subversive hacks but that our world is the experiment, the freestyle artistic experiment in the worldwide channels of mass media and p2p media networks (here we have machines and humans on the same level)…

So this time, we were looking at eBay, and we said, yes, what a nice and friendly company, what a cool thing they do, what a perfect marketplace – a global flea market – they offer us.. we want to do something nice, something positive…. we want to make it sound, we wanna write the soundtrack for this corporation, we want to contribute with music to this corporate epic which is currently being written…

The user is lured into a pseudo-participative environment by giving his/her eBay username and email address (plus we also retrieve date & time, IP address, operating system of computer etc) he/she gives up an enormous sum of data, but our data retrieval uses public and semi-public data and re-contextualizes this huge mass of data into a comprehensive song, this song carries all data we have about the user… but it can not be extracted again (practically, theoretically yes, it could be turned into ascii again)…

However regarding this interaction, we are not interested in giving the user an interactive experience. We want to entertain the user, to give him/her a full audio-visual experience packaged in a good, crisp story (5).

Recent scholarship about participatory culture has taken a more sceptical stance toward the notion that users can talk back to the culture and web industries (6). But it seems that UBERMORGEN.COM is taking a different tack, inserting their work into the space between producers and users, adding a layer that does not interfere with but calls attention to the naive behaviours of contemporary internet use. Bernhard describes it as:

Banality coupled with slightly schizophrenic emotion… the pop aspect usually carries a banal surface, but if you start getting into it on a consumer/user level, you feel the cracks in the story, and through these cracks, you can enter a psychotic universe of popularization of individual and very human existence, so through the cracks you can sneak into reality…

But what is the reality that might be revealed? Again, according to Bernhard:

I have no idea; that is part of the experiment, to create a setting within which we can find [or] produce results – or the users can individually go on the quest for corporate madness and global psychotics…so only after a certain time you can identify what the project actually reveals, the experience and the user-feedback (emails, statistics, songs) will tell us…

By leaving the experiment open rather than pre-selecting the possible outcomes, UBERMORGEN.COM follows the same route as other Web 2.0 producers that aim to leverage user participation. In this case, though, gaining more users doesn’t generate more revenue or, in turn, attract even more users or add value in any obvious manner. Instead, if anything, it makes more likely the revelation of patterns–if there are any, to begin with.

This piece seems to straddle the division between Net.Art 1.0 and what might come next, or perhaps represents some reconciliation between those earlier hackerish, subversive works and contemporary users’ slick, plug-n-play, naive activities. As Bernhard sums it up, “Sound of eBay is a mix of high-end technology to generate songs and pseudo-naive use of imagery (teletext-pornography)”, and this combination works to break the easy and comfortable relationship users are accustomed to having with Web 2.0 applications.

Taken as a whole, the EKMRZ-Trilogy embodies a transition from Net.Art 1.0, with its focus on hacking and piracy in Amazon Noir, to more overtly political subversion in GWEI, to the Sound of eBay, which depends on a symbiotic relationship with a web 2.0 company and uses the actual exchanges between users and producers as artistic material. While the experiment is incomplete, UBERMORGEN.COM’s work opens new areas for exploration and provides a fresh perspective for considering ongoing concerns with privacy, participation, and power.

(1) Google Will Eat Itself” and “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime” were both completed in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico (Neural.it) and Paolo Cirio; “The Sound of eBay” is a project solely done by UBERMORGEN.COM (with sound: Stefan Nussbaumer, Theorycoding: Grischinka Teufl, visual coding: LIA)

(2) net.art Year in Review: State of net.art 99 http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v5n3/D-1.html ; net.art 2.0“ Neue Materialien zur Netzkunst / New Materials towards Net art. translated by David Hudson, Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nürnberg 2001.

(3) “Hacking vrs. Defaults,” http://guthguth.blogspot.com/2007/01/hacking-defaults-hacking-nintendo.html

(4) Detailed notes on this conversation can be found on my research blog: http://kdevries.net/blog/?tag=sher-doruff

(5) Personal communications with Hans Bernhard, October 29th, November 3rd.

(6) Scholz, Trebor. A History of the Social Web, 2007 and Schaefer, Mirko Tobias. Bastard Culture: User Participation and the Extension of the Culture Industry, 2008. https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089642561/bastard-culture

Exhibition at HTTP Gallery by Doron Golan and Michael Szpakowski – Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent…

DORON & MICHAEL
BY EDWARD PICOT

The art of Doron Golan and Michael Szpakowski is in many ways a product of the digital revolution. Without that revolution it could not have existed in its present form, but from within that revolution, as artists and curators, they have contributed both to the development of a new kind of experimental film-making, and to the establishment of the online community which has allowed it to flourish.

The advance of digital technology has affected most branches of the arts, but perhaps none more profoundly than film. The word “film” itself has rapidly become a misnomer, with computer files replacing celluloid as the medium of capture and storage. As a result, the old-fashioned distinction between “film” and “video” – which goes back to a division between technologies for the cinema and television – has become less and less hard-edged. It is still rare for programmes originally made for television to be shown at the cinema, but certainly not vice versa, and increasingly movies and videos of all kinds are being watched on people’s computers.

Doron Golan, Sphinx11, 2007, Digital Video

Another effect of digitisation has been that filmmaking has become much more “doable” for ordinary people. A few years ago it came as a pleasant surprise to discover that your digital camera could be used to shoot movies a few seconds long. Nowadays you can capture extensive footage with your mobile phone, and having done so you can process it, edit it and add sound in increasingly sophisticated ways, using relatively cheap software on your PC. In other words, provided you are prepared to invest some time and effort, you can make movies without specialist equipment or facilities, for a fairly minimal outlay.

The third element of this revolution has been the use of the Web as a means for making independent work available to a global audience. With the growth of broadband the amount of time it took to download a short video was dramatically reduced, and streaming technologies came into their own. The public’s appetite for watching numerous short videos rather than longer, more linear pieces had already been demonstrated back in the 1980s by MTV. The Web soon proved that such short videos didn’t have to be welded onto pop tunes, or finished to a slick commercial standard, to find an appreciative audience. It also brought about a rapid transformation from a “push” culture to “push-and-pull”, where the public are creators as much as consumers of the work that appears online.

Michael Szpakowski, The Way Home, 2007, QuickTime Movie

The criticism most frequently aimed at this “push-and-pull” culture is that it produces far more porn and derivative dross than anything else. It’s a difficult accusation to deny, but it is also true that the explosion of home-made digital art has stimulated an enormous amount of artistic experimentation, and amongst the dross it has thrown up innovative work of genuine artistic merit. Furthermore, although it would be an exaggeration to say that the Web encourages cream to rise to the top, it does permit people to find work in which they are interested without becoming bogged down amongst the also-rans. One of the most fascinating things about the Web, in fact, is the way in which it seems to organise itself, synapse-like, into a proliferation of minor networks and circuits, allowing particular kinds of material to find their niche audiences, sometimes without the wider public being aware of their existence at all, but always with the potential for crossover.

Doron Golan and Michael Szpakowski have been actively involved in this process for some years now, both through their curatorial activities and their own artistic practice. On the curatorial side, Golan set up the DVblog website (http://dvblog.org/) in 2005, with the aim of promoting QuickTime video as an artform, with particular emphasis on artistic experimentation. (“Whilst we don’t turn up our noses at the trivial, popular & amusing,” says the website, “we also try to bring you the best in new & challenging work.”) Szpakowski became one the co-curators shortly after the site launched, and since 2007 has been its primary editor.

Doron Golan, Burning Promenade, 2008, Digital Video

On the artistic side, Golan (whose work can be seen at http://the9th.com/) says “In ’98 I started using Apple’s QuickTime architecture as my main working tool”. Like everyone posting films on the Web at that time, his work shows a keen awareness of the constraints imposed by narrow bandwidth. The earliest pieces on his site combine multiple small QuickTime windows, positioned via HTML, into ingenious abstract and near-abstract compositions. Szpakowski entered the arena slightly later, beginning to publish new media work such as An Enemy of the People (a Shockwave piece) online in 2002. By 2003 he had already started making QuickTime movies (subsequently collected online as “Scenes of Provincial Life,” http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi): these quickly became “a major focus” of his work and have continued at the rate of at least two or three per month ever since.

Apart from their devotion to QuickTime and their association with DV Blog, Golan and Szpakowski share a number of other characteristics, which seem to suggest that they belong to the same “school” of experimental filmmaking. Both of them have dabbled in code and computer-generated imagery – abstract films, where what we see on-screen is created by programming rather than recorded from the outside world; but without eschewing such techniques altogether they have both tended to move towards a more overtly representational style as their work has developed. Both have sometimes used archive footage, and in doing so have displayed one of the signature motifs of digital art, a tendency to remix and “mash up” material originally produced by other hands. Both have used techniques of slowing footage down, speeding it up or running it backwards to encourage their viewers to look at familiar things afresh, or to invest everyday scenes with magical, surreal qualities.

Both have also shown considerable interest in the Lumiere Manifesto (see http://videoblogging.info/), which, following in the style of the Lumiere brothers who were among the pioneers of cinema, demands simplicity of technique from the film-maker: a fixed point of view with no panning, no zooming, no editing and no “effects”. Neither Golan nor Szpakowski is inclined to stick to the tenets of this manifesto rigidly, but their shared liking for the minimalism of the Lumiere does imply certain other qualities: an eye for a good subject; an inclination to let that subject “speak for itself”; a sense of composition; an interest in the small details of apparently-uneventful scenes; and a willingness to strip away the conventions of commercial video and film practice, to get back to the basics of film-making.

Having said all this, there are also noteworthy differences between the two. Golan’s work, in places, has a theatricality which extends to the use of actors and scripts. There are points at which his films resemble something by Samuel Beckett, in their unsentimental mingling of the absurd and the melancholic, their hilarity and their focus on the discomforts of human flesh. Elsewhere, he shows a genius for capturing “real-life” individuals, both their quirks and their dignity, sometimes conveying a great sense of complexity in an astonishingly short space of time. This same sense of balanced complexity comes across from his handling of political themes, which is an important aspect of his work. His films often confront us with politically explosive material, and by avoiding cliché and focussing on unexpected details they invariably challenge our preconceptions and leave us feeling both bewildered and liberated.

Michael Szpakowski, House and Garden, 2008, Animated GIFS and JavaScript

In some ways one of the fundamental aims of Szpakowski’s work is very similar: to make us look twice at the things we thought we already knew. In his case, however, there is a personal, everyday quality to his output, which makes it feel more autobiographical, less public. We are often in his house or his back garden, walking the streets of his hometown, or riding with him on a bus or a train, sometimes meeting his friends or his relatives. There are fewer character-studies, but there is more of a sense of social milieu. One obvious point of comparison with Golan is that Szpakowski’s films are often accompanied by music he has composed himself, sometimes comical and bustling, sometimes urgent and driving, and sometimes wistful and nostalgic. The subject matter is everyday, but charged with symbolism, magic, and often a really poignant sense of time. Fallen blossom floats back into the tree from which it fell. Anonymous strangers are glimpsed walking along pavements, or looking out of windows. Old black and white photographs mingle with illustrations from a child’s picture book.

Michael’s videos are far more numerous than Doron’s, and partly because of this his work has a more spontaneous, intuitive feel, and perhaps less sense of structure and intellectual rigour. In terms of painting, if Golan reminds us of a great formalist such as Seurat, then Szpakowski reminds us of an impressionist such as Sisley – or, in his more dreamlike moments, a post-impressionist like Chagall. And the references to painters are not inappropriate, because both men have amply demonstrated, over a period of years, how in the right hands the short film can be an artistic medium every bit as expressive and full of formal possibilities as canvas and pigment.

Information:

Edward Picot is an artist and writer based in Kent, UK. He holds a PhD in English Literature and has a particular interest in hyperliterature, having founded the Hyperliterature Exchange in 2003.

He frequently publishes art criticism and creative writing online. http://edwardpicot.co.uk

Published on the occasion of the exhibition – Whereof one cannot speak; thereof one must be silent: Doron Golan and Michael Szpakowski,
HTTP Gallery, London, 16 January till 28,
February 2009.

HTTP Gallery in Haringey, North London, is Furtherfield.org’s dedicated space for media art. Furtherfield.org provides platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices in art and technology. Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are supported by Arts Council England, London.

http://http.uk.net/
http://www.furtherfield.org

Pixel-labs’ “Playful:Game Design London” at Conway hall (30/10/08) was part of the London Games Festival Fringe. It wasn’t what I expected. I hadn’t done my homework before going and I had only seen a list of presenters next to the organisations that they represented. I expected corporate plugs of their latest products, the Beeb’s latest convergence project, some cutscene showreels etc. No, it was more than that. Whilst presenters proudly boasted their affiliations they also presented their own work. The event could arguably be described as Dorkbot for videogames. Dorkbot’s strapline ‘people doing strange things with electricity’; this time the electricity is powering Xboxes, PCs and Wii’s (oh and the other ones too!) A brief description of the presentations should give a decent idea of the richness of the event.

First up was James Wallis of Spaaace (to be enunciated in a 50’s Flash Gordon stylee!) commenting on the history of textual play from OuLiPo to Fighting Fantasy books and how heavy handed government intervention was responsible for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

James Wallis

Next was Roo Reynolds of the BBC on how to turn a Rock Band guitar into a real musical instrument by using key mapping software, interfacing with Garage Band and pumping it all into a wah-wah pedal and a guitar amp. Hotel California was never one of my favourite tracks but a commendable performance was given. Rock!

Adrian Hon, Six To Start, wouldn’t talk about ARG’s – Adrian and His brother Dan worked on the award winning Perplex City – but instead discussed his drinking whilst playing Team Fortress 2 across time zones. It started whilst trying to get to sleep after being wired as well as playing on American servers late at night. This was ironic as his partner was working on an alcohol awareness campaign at the time.

Chris Delay, Introversion, explained procedural generation; how to make trees and cities from a simple set of rules or how to produce art without an art team.

Matthew Irvine Brown, Last.fm, makes interfaces; musical ones, familiar ones. Trumpet Hero anyone? Or even Sousaphone Hero. Get the notes wrong and a member of the brass band falls over drunk. Matthew also makes remote controlled cars, well, breath controlled and based around wind instrument breathing exercises plus musical sock puppets-play a scale whilst opening and closing the sock puppets mouth. The sock puppets were installed at club events where the punters then turned them into flirty social toys.

Eric Clough, 212Box, discussed the project “Mystery on Fifth Avenue”. His design firm were commissioned to redecorate a New York apartment. The twist is that the apartment was turned into a puzzle game. A secret panel somewhere in the house opens to reveal a book with clues leading to inscriptions hidden in murals. With the furniture transforming when secret keys are used to open panels revealing more clues. The game was designed for the children living in the apartment.

Jolyon Webb, Blitz Games Studios, was asked by organiser Toby Barnes to explain why teeth are so badly portrayed in videogames, so Jolyon explained a few things based around the tendency to model perfect Hollywood choppers. described how intensive it is to model realistic teeth and how they affect the entire facial expression. Jolyon currently works with medical modelling and is developing human busts that represent blood loss and trauma. He screened an extremely disturbing video of a simulated head slowly bleeding to death and also an interface to model and refine extremely realistic dynamic feature modelling. The kind of thing that many video games use to create an avatars features although much more realistic, however it is still very easy to model ‘hillbillies’-we’ve all done it!

Kars Christian Pieter, Alfrink, on playgrounds that kids build themselves, developing sandbox scenarios where play emerges…from skateboarding in disused swimming pools to describing games as ‘tools for having fun’.

Matt Biddulph, Dopplr, enthused about the Arduino board which allows hardware devices to interface with each other. Particularly interesting is the new DS Brut which is a cartridge for the Nintendo DS that allows all sorts of potential connectivity. He also showed Johnny Lee’s wiimote IR tracking experiments, does anybody remember the trackir? It isn’t open source but has been available to simulation nuts for quite some time.

Matt Biddulph

Alex Fleetwood, Sandpit and the Hide and Seek festival, talked about his new project but it’s meant to be a little hush hush at the mo’.

Iain Tait of Poke’s obsession with high scores had parallels with Tom Armitage of Headshift’s presentation on how we have always been multi-player. The discussions and stories told outside the actual game environment have always been critical, many a pub tale or bragging session has stemmed from play. the original high score table in classic arcade games to the narratives, stories and tales that games generate, designers build commonality and sociality into games.

Eric Zimmerman, Gamelab, discussed games as a form of literacy and presented his latest on-line game creation system.

Kieron Gillen, writer, discussed how important plagiarism is! Lemme explain… most games are an evolution of what has been previously successful, however many game elements and mechanics from the past should be revisited. “Little Computer People” in the late 80’s to “The Sims” is a very successful example of this. The only problem is that developers stick to what is commercially viable and are reluctant to try some of the more off the wall ideas.

It was a fun and entertaining day that presented a significant amount of hacking, fiddling, noodling and pootling around the notion of play and games from social interactions to novel interfaces. But the format precluded any discussion at the actual event with no formal discussion panel staged. There was lots of chatting in the pub post-event though. It’s also interesting to note that little was mentioned relating the practice to art although design, production, agency and sociality were covered. There was little explicit mention of art apart from Alex Fleetwood who specifically placed his practice as art. This is significant considering the parallels with the more playful aspects of media arts and may be symptomatic of the ‘design’ oriented title of the event, although as media artists, if we are still allowed to use that term, there’s a lot of commonality in both practice and discourse.

Welcome To Mars
Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959
Strange Attractor Press 2008
ISBN 978-0-9548054-8-7

Strange Attractor press are part of a contemporary resurgence of interest in esoterica in the UK that explores sociological and technological strangeness in the way that previous expressions of this cultural current explored the supernatural. They publish an excellent, eponymous, journal and the kind of electronic music that the Radiophonic Workshop would have made if it had been relocated to Summerisle.

Their latest book is “Welcome To Mars” by Ken Hollings, subtitled “Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1957-1959”. Hollings combines the history of 1950s America as told by the New York Times with the same history as told by the Fortean Times. It’s eye-opening (sometimes consciousness-expanding) stuff, a look at the wiring under the board of the culture and technology of an era.

Starting with the building of the first “Levittown” pre-fabricated suburban settlement and ending, almost, with the broadcast of the first episode of The Twilight Zone, Hollings traces the history of the scientific and popular imagination wherever it leads. The history that Hollings constructs is Rhizomatic. It is a history of the links between technology, popular culture, power and society.

Conspiracy theorists see links where none exist. But history that tries to be too tidy will miss links where they could be informative. The links that Hollings demonstrates are very real and bring the culture that emerged from the aftermath of the Second World War into vivid focus. This is the mythology and self-image of a supposedly scientific era that led directly to our own.

Suburbia and the military-industrial complex both emerged in America from the planned economy of World War Two. The military-industrial complex continued from wartime research and manufacturing projects. The construction of suburban homes was carried out by contractors involved in the atomic bomb project, and the layout of suburbia was developed in response to the threat of atomic bombing. Into these parallel structures flowed fear of the unseen – of atomic radiation, brainwashing, computation and the unknown inhabitants of strange saucer-shaped phenomena that were first seen in the sky in this era.

In an age when the future, whether utopian or apocalyptic, was both technological and almost here the planet Mars seemed within reach. Whether imagined as the furthest outpost of an American empire or as the source of an unstoppable alien invasion force, Mars was the embodiment of the promise of a technological future. As the social, cultural, architectural and technological forms of the 1950s became ever stranger Mars would have seemed no more alien than the suburbs or their surrounding deserts.

This is the world, or the time, that gave us the RAND think tank, Game Theory, Cybernetics, Information theory, the nuclear arms and space races. This is the first commercial distribution of LSD and its use on an unsuspecting population by the CIA. This is the rise of psychoanalysis, scientology, alien abducteeism, tranquiliser abuse. This is mind control tested in blatant disregard of the Nuremberg Code. Most of all, this is the unlikely flow of people and ideas between these areas.

The technology and aesthetics of the post-war era, whether the austere grids of government papers or the lurid imagery of pulp magazines and B-Movies are, as the book’s subtitle indicates, fantasies of science. These fantasies have continued through the “white heat of technology” of the 1960s to present-day environmental apocalypses and internet fantasies of technological solutions to them. And they are present in the art and activism of twenty-first century technoculture.

From an artistic point of view I wish that Hollings could have spent more time on the artistic and musical avant-garde, but that isn’t the point of this study. This is the story of the technological culture of the ruling class and the aesthetics of the mass culture and spontaneous social phenomena that tried to come to terms with it.

The esoteric and alternative cannot be separated from the official and mainstream in the long chains of meaning and iconography that Hollings teases out. This isn’t a product of reading-in or supposition, it is there in the historical record. And this isn’t just a list of great men and great ideas. The deluded and the mendacious play their part as much as the great and the good. Hollings has produced a skeleton key to the high, mass and alternative culture of the day.

This is a framework for understanding the art and culture of the 1950s in context. You can find out why the new advanced technology of the tape recorder became associated with the musically primitive. You can find out the symbolic role of Robbie The Robot from “Forbidden Planet”, who attended the opening of This Is Tomorrow at the ICA. You can get a feel for what was happening as Brion Gysin discovered the cut up method. Then you can read up on Jack Parsons, RAND, MK-ULTRA, and fit them into your knowledge of the Beats and Abstract Expressionism.

This is an exemplary exercise in cross-specialism history. We can learn from this and apply its method to understanding our own times, or at least our own recent past. Don’t be fooled by the sanitized autobiography of a culture, look for the untidy realities that lie behind it and you’ll be much the wiser. The history of computing, for example, is not just the history of men and women in white coats. The roots of the often drug-fueled or mystically-inspired technological culture of the 1950s can be followed into the counter-culture, conceptualism and art computing of the 1960s and 1970s, and even into the network culture and techno-economics of the 1980s and 1990s.

“Welcome To Mars” is well worth reading on its own unique terms. It is a rollercoaster ride through the dreamtime of post-war American esoteric, technological and mass culture with a wealth of often amazing and sometimes shocking information on every page. Hollings never lets this become overwhelming or lose is connection to the main threads of his historical narrative. And the technological aesthetics, iconography and concepts of the 1950s can be used allegorically to understand and depict our own times. The cover of the book, for example, looks like a 1950s performance but in fact it shows a work produced in 2002. Welcome to Mars indeed.

http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Female Icons is a multifaceted project by the artist group known as De Geuzen. Riek Sijbring, Femke Snelting, and Renee Turner are the primary members, and have been making work together under the De Geuzen identity since 1996.

In their FAQs, they state that their name is, “A Dutch term for a negative or derogatory name appropriated and reclaimed as a positive label of empowerment,” which bears an interesting relationship to the Female Icons project.

Female icons includes workshops, an online archive of images and tags, a user-generated collection of photos, and other generative events that the group hosts at events and festivals.

On the project’s website, each icon added to the site has her portrait added to the grid of oval images in the background of the page. When you click on an icon, you are taken to that page for that woman. There, the picture has a set of tags associated with it, and as you mouse-over the icon you have chosen, you can click on any of the tags, and see all the icons associated with that characteristic (i.e., ‘writing’ or ‘radical’). There is a tag cloud on the project homepage, showing ‘strength’ as the most popular trait as of mid-September. If instead of clicking a tag you click directly on the icon, you are redirected to a Google image search of that person.

The aesthetic of this project’s archive reinforces the idea that an icon or representation is in itself a way of seeing. Seeing the symmetrical grid of images almost evoke a sense of uniformity – they are all of the same size but with radically different contents. De Geuzen does not shy away from the way in which we form collections and stories in the present in an attempt to understand the continuity of what it means to be female through acts of collection, homogenization, discussion, and disambiguation. This provides us with a collective means for seeing the female throughout history, and the resulting collection of hyperlinked media provides a way to draw comparisons and inferences that aren’t always as available when we study a singular biography.

The interesting thing about exploring this project was determining what I thought the mission of the project to be. I wondered what kinds of questions it was asking, and what it was seeking to embody as an endeavor. I initially thought it might be asking the question, What makes an icon an icon? or What makes a female an icon? But as I looked into the project, it didn’t seem that it was seeking to deconstruct the status of the ‘icon’, or to separate a public view of women from private ones. Rather, I think it is taking the icon as a given – embracing the idea that an image and a status exist together – and builds a network of expressions and testimonies on top of this evidential notion. De Geuzen is letting the research, images, and lectures of the Female Icon project reveal something about our social histories. They state that they wish to show the “social underpinnings of the feminine in all its cliche’s, perversities and conventions.” In other words, I think they may be trying to excavate the range of meanings of a recognized ‘icon’ by forming a network of them and letting the emergent dialogue speak for itself.

The tagline for the project, “it’s not the gaze, but the look”, embodies the notion that iconography is in fact, as the term literary means, ‘image writing’. Images perhaps speak more directly than academic vocabularies tend to, and allow us to confront category, characteristic, and aesthetic.

In a sense, they have used the conciseness of the ‘icon’ to build an interactive network of involvement, patterns, and knowledge. Perhaps the most important aspects of the project are the user-contributed images and artifacts. The project asks outside users to take their own picture with the cutout face of an icon of their own, and post the results to their Flickr pool. These images within images signify the heart of the project – that the icon is worn in the present, and we decide how they are preserved and projected, how they ‘look’. Icons express the social and personal distinctions and values that we as a social entity apply to the past at any given moment – the icons present a way to reverse-engineer our present moment. They reveal the nature of our appearance, rather than dwell on analyses of how we are seen.

To me this project shows that thinking about appearance through networked definitions is more empowering than defining ourselves through the gaze that is upon us. History becomes something we put in front of us, rather than something we look back on. In a way, when I looked at the collection of photos, I did not immediately think of women’s issues or controversies – I simply felt the collective images speaking for a group of individuals choosing what makes a female an icon to them. In turn, we get a glimpse of how we all are constructed by the achievements of others.

The ways in which history and its archives help us to define biography have changed with the availability of images and information. The Female Icons project recognizes this milieu of material as our contemporary toolbox for understanding complex and dynamic notions, such as ‘the feminine’.

De Geuzen shows with this media-based project that icons can be used side-by-side (it’s not everyday that we see Paris Hilton in proximity to Judith Butler!), collectively, and distributed among many women, and expose patterns that speak to larger stories and timelines when linked together. Since society does the work of bringing forth the icon, we can use tools of media to think about what is means to us as to why they exist in the way that they do.

Lift up Your Heads,

O Ye Gates

An Appreciation of David Daniels 1933 – 2008

http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/

Click here for Tributes to David Daniels by Divers Hands

This article is co-published by The Hyperliterature Exchange and Furtherfield.

David Daniels, who died in May 2008, was a shape-poet. Between 1984 (when, already in his fifties, he first began to create picture-poems) (1) and the year of his death, he produced three huge sequences of work: The Gates of Paradise, Years and Humans.

The Gates of Paradise contains over 350 poems, each of which, according to Daniels’ Introduction to the project, is “an icon of our world… that exhibits some of the ways I’ve seen living and dead human beings struggling to find happiness inside themselves and outside of them… My idea is to nourish the buried real human inside…” They are poems about people and their states of mind, sometimes satirical, sometimes visionary and sometimes obscene.

The Years sequence comprises one poem for every year of Daniels’ life (up to 2002 when the project was completed), plus one extra poem set in 2133 after his death. Many of the poems are autobiographical, but 1962 is almost a poem apart, or rather a novella, complete with narrative, multiple characters and dialogue. This section was described by Daniels as “a mini epic, 70 pages long, [which] I wrote in sonata form” (2). 1962 had a special significance for Daniels, because it was the year when “Earth became a technicolor Oz for me due to a sea change in my life that led me into a permanent inner joy” (3).

Humans, Daniels’ final project, is a sequence of 200 poems based on the lives, writings and biographical details of 200 individuals – some living, some dead, some of them relatives or friends of Daniels, some his fellow-artists, and some known to him through his reading. Again, as in The Gates of Paradise, his concern is with the inner lives of his subjects, and his treatment of those inner lives ranges from satire and hilarity to visionary intensity – sometimes within the space of the same poem.

What is shape poetry? In his preface to Years Daniels writes: “David Daniels has been making words out of pictures and pictures out of words for over 60 years” – which is probably as good a description of his art as any. Shape poetry (also known as concrete poetry, visual poetry or pattern poetry) is poetry in which the actual shapes of the words and letters make an important contribution to the meaning of the verse. Some of the earliest examples, cited as influences by Daniels himself, are the “pattern poems” collected in The Greek Anthology, where the text forms the shapes of an axe, a pair of wings, an egg, and so forth (4). Another much-cited example is “The Mouse’s Tale” by Lewis Carroll (from Alice in Wonderland), which resembles a long wavy tail, with the font-size gradually becoming smaller and smaller towards the end so that the tail dwindles to a fine point. This latter example is particularly relevant to Daniels, firstly because it displays a quirky sense of humour, and secondly because it manipulates not just the position of words on the page but the way in which they are displayed – the font-size – to achieve its effect. Thirdly, there are the Calligrammes of the French experimental poet Guillaume Apollinaire (5), published in 1918 shortly after his death, where the words (sometimes handwritten) form pictures such as the Eiffel Tower and a woman in a hat.

Concrete poetry established itself as a “movement”, complete with its own manifesto, in Brazil in the 1950s (6), and it’s no coincidence that Daniels’ work was greeted with much enthusiasm by the Brazilians Regina Celia Pinto and Jorge Luis Antonio; but whereas the concrete poets of the fifties argued their case in theoretical terms (“Concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language… it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles…” (7)), Daniels himself preferred to account for his chosen style in terms of his background and personal inclinations:

When I was little sometimes I wished I was looking at pictures when I was reading books. And sometimes I wished I was reading words when I was looking at pictures. I was probably prejudiced by films which were pictures that spoke words. When I wrote I wished I could write pictures. When I painted I wished I could paint words. (3)

He was also influenced by his family’s involvement with print:

My father’s four brothers were printers in Newark, New Jersey… My Uncle Nathan… would sit at this huge line-o-type machine and type in things and out would come typeset. I was only there once and I watched him and I said, “Nathan, what are you doing?” He said, “I’m writing a poem.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “It’s just nothing, it’s just a poem for someone, someone wants a poem for their wedding.” So he was typesetting poems and I might have got the idea from that.(2)

If the first quote hints at Daniels’ visionary and experimental tendencies – his love of magical transformations and his impatience with received form and its constraints (“When I wrote I wished I could write pictures. When I painted I wished I could paint words.”) – the second suggests other important aspects of his work: a fascination with craftsmanship and process, and an interest in the intersection between art and technology.

Daniels always freely acknowledged the importance of technology to his art:

Some people have tried to create shape poems with a typewriter. No one could write the shapes I write without a computer.(3)

“I use Microsoft Word, I started in 1984. I started off with Microsoft Word and every new Microsoft Word, I’ve had to redo everything I’ve done until the latest one because it has gray shading, unless they come out with something that makes things move.”

“And at that time, I began to come under the influence of the Internet. I had never had the internet before and someone named Mark Peters started sending me these weird poems where people had taken things off the internet and assembled them. So people started sending me at that time, I guess it was 1994/95, this amazing lists of things, jokes, dirty words, things that have happened, slang, everything under the sun… I just took them and put them into my works.”(2)

Daniels is one of those figures who straddles the divide between digital and pre-digital art and literature. His emphasis as an artist was always on process and practice rather than concept and theory, and for that reason he was never inclined to insist, as some new media artists and writers do, on the fundamental differences between the page and the screen, or between a virtual image and a painted or printed one. In new media terms, his output was fairly low-tech. His work was never interactive, generative or otherwise coded. As far as I know he never involved himself in programming: he simply used the Microsoft Word software-package as he found it, for his own purposes. On the other hand he clearly had a very detailed grasp of Word’s capabilities in terms of text layout and presentation, and he used it with a craftsmanship of which his Uncle Nathan would have been proud:

And then there are subtler things where you need to get a line to go up so if there is a word like light or elevation, you can by raising it 5 point, _ point (sic), 1 point you can get a word to get up or down and then when people read it, it affects them the way meter works.(2)

His shape poems achieve their effects through the strategic use of different fonts, font-sizes, ranging, kerning, bold type, italics, upper and lower case and (perhaps most importantly) empty space. He could make a block of text look like a human being, an elephant, a pyramid, a sunset, a tree, a pointing finger or a griffin. Until you’ve actually tried to do the kind of things he did it’s quite difficult to understand the attention to detail and the technical expertise involved. But he wasn’t content simply to perfect his skill at making shapes out of words. In his last work, Humans, he took an important step away from the paradigm of the printed page, and began to exploit the possibilities of the computer as a display-medium in itself – firstly by adding multiple colours to his pages (both text and backgrounds), secondly by building them into sequences which could be viewed as stop-frame animations, and thirdly – right at the end of his life – by adding sound.

His claim to be thought of as a digital artist, if it matters, rests partly on these late experiments: but it also rests on the enthusiasm with which he embraced the Web and was embraced in his turn by other experimental writers working online. According to his entry on Wikipedia (8), he described a web artist as “a human or a machine that pours out his/her/its soul on the internet” – in other words he didn’t think web artists were defined by any particular medium or artform, but by their use of the internet as a means of dissemination. On the other hand, his account of how he used material from the internet in his work (“people started sending me… everything under the sun… I just took them and put them into my works”) has an authentic new media ring to it – the author as an assembler of online “found” materials. He was also like a lot of other digital artists in his enthusiasm for the open source, copyleft principle of making work available online for nothing: “My art is available in .pdf form FREE at my website. Why should I wait around for no one to buy it?” (9) He was delighted to allow UbuWeb (http://www.ubu.com/) to display both The Gates of Paradise and Years in their entirety. In the same way, in 2004 he allowed Regina Celia Pinto to publish all he had completed up to that time of the Humans project (10), and promised her that she could have the whole thing when it was finished.

http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/tgop_pdf/198gate.pdf

His friendships with Regina Pinto of The Museum of the Essential (http://www.arteonline.arq.br/) and with Kenneth Goldsmith of UbuWeb are examples of the connections he made, and the high regard in which he was held, within the digital arts community. As well as UbuWeb and The Museum of the Essential, his work was also featured in Deluxe Rubber Chicken (http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/chicken/six/contents.html), Drunken Boat (http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/drunkenboat/daniels/daniels.html), Iowa Review Web (http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/sept04/index.html), Xerolage (http://xexoxial.org/xerolage/x34.html) and Whalelane (http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/GOP_whaleline/whaleline_index.htm). The names of digital artists featured in the Humans project give some idea of how well-regarded he became in the new media field: Alan Sondheim, Jim Andrews, Mez, Ana Maria Uribe, Barry Smiley, Lewis Lacook, Joel Weishaus, mIEKAL aND, Michael Szpakowski and so on. Many of these connections were made via the WebArtery e-mail group, which he joined in 2001, and to which he continued to post items of interest and comments about other people’s work until within a few weeks of his death. When the members of this group heard (via Joel Weishaus) that Daniels was terminally ill, the list was flooded with messages of regret and appreciation, and one noteworthy aspect of this reaction was the number of webarterians who remarked that they had been looking at his work again and realising what an achievement it was.

So what was it about his shape poems which commanded such respect from his peers? It wasn’t simply the quality or technical mastery of his page-design or the excellence of his writing: it was the vitality, variety and inventiveness of his output, along with its ambition and scale. As Michael Basinski remarks in his interview with Daniels, “Unlike other visual poetry that is minimalist, your work is narrative.” In fact Daniels’ work mixes poetry and prose together with complete freedom, but his shape-poems are certainly very wordy compared with most other artists working in the same tradition. It is significant in this regard that Daniels professed not to like very much poetry. He claimed that he started writing poetry of his own when his son Chris “gave me a book called The Stuffed Owl which is an anthology of bad verse by good writers edited by D. B. Wyndham Lewis. It’s the poetry I first read that I ever liked. It was just so easy to read and it was so interesting.” (2) The writers he admired tended to be novelists – ” I have a very good ear for writing because when I hear things, I think of Dickens, Hemingway, and all these people” (2) – Dickens was obviously a particular favourite; and the 1962 section of Years certainly shows a novelist-like talent for character, dialogue, description, social milieu, multiple viewpoints and so forth.

But despite his protestation that he preferred bad poetry to good, there are clear links between his work and the Romantic movement. For one thing, he was obviously an admirer of William Blake. Before Daniels used it, The Gates of Paradise was already the title of one of Blake’s later and lesser-known works; and his admiration for Blake is made clear in the interview with Michael Basinski (2):

Anyone who… tries to make a masterpiece is considered a lunatic weirdo. That’s what my best friends call me… Well, Blake was like that… He was considered a total idiot. And let’s hope he was.

My son… told me, dad, wait until they see this, no one’s ever written their life story in pictures. People are going to be in awe. They’re going to think you’re like Blake.

It’s easy to understand why Daniels would have felt drawn to Blake: an outsider and revolutionary who insisted on producing his work in a completely idiosyncratic way, despite its lack of critical or commercial success; a self-publisher who put a great deal of craftsmanship and technical expertise into his books along with a great deal of invention; and an artist who was equally gifted as a poet and a picture-maker. But there is another point of similarity too: Blake was a visionary. He believed that most human beings spent their lives repressing and denying the divinity that dwelt within them. His work is complex, but it is unified by a single message: that people should free themselves from the “mind-forg’d manacles” which imprison them, and realise their true potential.

Daniels worked in very much the same spirit. He believed that humanity was divine, but its divinity was often repressed and twisted by upbringing, society and circumstance. In 2000 he described The Gates of Paradise to John Strausbaugh (11) in the following terms: “they’re gates to inside a person. And also paradise is really inside people – happiness.” And in his 2004 interview with Jorge Luiz Antonio and Regina Celia Pinto he developed the same theme in a way which brings to mind not only Blake but the Wordsworth of “Intimations of Immortality”:

When children are born they are a fine invisible engine as soft as the mirror on a pool of silk water inside a clumsy automobile. As they grow they crash in accidents and get dents and scrapes and road dirt all over their automobile. They are trained to forget they are an invisible engine inside… Whenever they say – “I have an invisible engine”… they are told that they are crazy, or to go on a boring drive they hate…

Compare this with Wordsworth’s lines:

Thou little child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom…

…Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

One thing which separated Daniels from Blake and Wordsworth alike, however – apart from his atheism – was that his work was frequently very funny, and just as it freely mingled poetry and prose, it also balanced its visionary qualities with moments of startling earthiness. Here, for example, is an extract from the 1962 section of Years:

“Get your goddam hands off the shoulder, farm boy! Fuck you in the teeth with a blow torch, you greenballed grandmother raping goddam cock sucking son of a bitch.”

and here is an extract from his last completed Human, Shane Morgan Seavey, published in March 2008:

Shane Morgan Seavey loves Milk: Burping: Farting: Mommy: Daddy: Grandpa: Grandma: Nana: & Papa: Bella: & Buster: And his giant world famous railroad tunnel of giant shits…

http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/tgop_pdf/198gate.pdf

Of course, Daniels’ work will not be to everyone’s taste. He never made any secret of the fact that he was trying to write masterpieces (“Why doesn’t anyone want to do anything important anymore?”), and this in itself imposes a barrier between him and those theoreticians who argue that the age of the masterpiece is dead. He isn’t a concept artist: in many ways he is a throwback to the old Romantic idea of the artist as an inspired individual, a kind of prophet who can see through our drab materialism to the inner truths it obscures. He also belongs in the American tradition of bardic experimentalists, along with Whitman and Ginsberg (although he professed not to like Ginsberg).

Like Whitman and Ginsberg, he can be prolix. Because he made up words to fill out the typographical shapes he was creating, there is an element of “padding” to his writing, and he often uses a kind of sing-song word-association of indefinite length: “And now I will say farewell to you: And I will sing of another jolly work loving level headed warm breaded friend making householding drawing sketching painting designing building far corner of the world azure cobalt navy sapphire…” At its best this has an improvisational quality like jazz, but at its weakest it can become reminiscent of the “lipsmacking thirstquenching ace tasting motivating Pepsi” advert.

Another potential weak-point is that, because Daniels’ pictures were made of lots of small words rather than a few large ones, it is always difficult to appreciate them as pictures and as writing both at the same time. In effect they separate out into two layers, and probably the best method of looking at them (on the computer-screen) is to reduce them in size and enjoy them as pictures first of all, then increase them in size and enjoy them as writing afterwards. Only once they have been looked at in both these ways does their full unity of design become apparent. This separation into two different layers became even more emphatic in the Humans project, when Daniels began to combine lots of similar pages with the same text on them into long sequences, to create stop-frame animations. But after all, the same criticism – that the design can only be appreciated by detaching yourself from the text, and the text can only be appreciated by detaching yourself from the design – can be levelled at illuminated manuscripts, and it doesn’t prevent them from being amongst the best-loved artefacts of mediaeval culture. The objection is a theoretical one, which tends to become insubstantial when you absorb yourself the actual work, because the same qualities of vitality and imagination come across from both the written and pictorial aspects. One leads you to the other, and his unique artistic personality seems to emerge equally from both.

In the last analysis Daniels’ flaws are part of his artistic personality. His freewheeling verbosity is part of his energy and inventiveness, and it goes hand-in-hand with his imagination and humour. The fact that his art in some ways seems to be going in two directions at once, doing two different things at the same time, is an expression of his Protean quality, his impatience with received forms, his desire to create something uniquely his own. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked to work with a restricted pallette or hold himself in check for the sake of greater control and perfection. His art is about liberation, uninhibited outpouring, spontaneity and fun. It is a completely human art: its flaws are human flaws: and that’s exactly the way he would have wanted it.

Notes:

(1) See Interview with Michael Basinski (http://www.ubu.com/papers/daniels_interview.html): “I use Microsoft Word. I started in 1984 and really started writing in 84. I started Gates in 87.”

(2) Interview with Michael Basinski (http://www.ubu.com/papers/daniels_interview.html)

(3) Interview with Jorge Juis Antonio and Regina Celia Pinto (http://arteonline.arq.br/museu/interviews/david.htm)

(4) See Interview with Jorge Luis Antonio and Regina Celia Pinto, opus cited: “In the 1950’s I stumbled upon The Greek Anthology – Vol 5 – Loeb Classical Library – 1953 – Book XV – MISCELANEA EPIGRAM 21- The Pipe Of Theocritus- A picture of the pipe of Pan in words written about Pan.” The Greek pattern poems themselves can be seen at http://www.theoi.com/Text/PatternPoems.html.

(5) http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/ppspawlowski-67984-apollinaire-calligrams-le-pont-mirabeau-calligram-entertainment-ppt-powerpoint/

(6) See, for example, the website of Augusto de Campos, a pioneer of the movement, at http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/home.htm

(7) Quoted in the Wikipedia article on concrete poetry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry

(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Daniels_(poet)

(9) http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewpayments.php

(10) http://www.arteonline.arq.br/david/

© Edward Picot, October 2008

Pure:dyne Discussion on Netbehaviour.

Marc invited two team members of the GOTO10 collective, Heather Corcoran and Aymeric Mansoux to discuss about pure:dyne on the Netbehaviour.org list.

The discussion took place between October 16th – 23rd Oct 08. An interview and an open discussion was joined by other list members of Netbehaviour.

pure:dyne is a Linux live distribution based on Debian. It is dedicated to live audiovisual processing and streaming, and focuses largely on the Pure Data audio synthesis system, although it also includes SuperCollider, Csound as well as live video-processing systems such as Packet Forth and Fluxus. Another aspect of pure:dyne is that it is maintained by media artists for media artists. The system provides particular optimizations at the kernel and compilation level to take the most out of i686 machines for real-time audio and video. As a consequence, this operating system is well suited for live performances and art installations. The modular aspect makes it easy for artists to customize and deploy it quickly to their own project needs.

For more information about GOTO10, pure:dyne, Heather Corcoran and Aymeric Mansoux, scroll to the bottom of this page.

It begins…

Marc Garrett:

Hi Heather Corcoran & Aymeric Mansoux – a warm welcome to the Netbehaviour list.

I know that there are a few on this list who are interested in pure:dyne. Some have already used it and others are playing with the idea of using it. It would be great to hear from them as well, regarding their own thoughts and experiences with pure:dyne, as the interview progresses. Anyone can take part in this discussion.

So, I would like to kick off this discussion by asking Heather Corcoran or Aymeric Mansoux why they decided to get involved with pure:dyne and what it means to them, as practitioners in their own field, and what it means to them culturally?

Heather Corcoran:

Hi Marc, hi everyone,

Thanks everyone for the welcome and interest in pure:dyne. That question is interesting because Aymeric and I will have two different perspectives, him as an artist and co-founder of the project, and me as a curator/producer and newer to the project. Aymeric is actually teaching a pure:dyne workshop this week with some of the other developers at Goldsmiths, through Graham Harwood, so he might be popping in and out of discussion in the evenings as he can.

I joined the pure:dyne team about a year and a half ago though have been near the project for about three. The team has grown quite organically and socially, it was founded by members of the GOTO10 collective http://www.goto10.org who themselves met through workshops and events around London and Europe. When I first started working at Space Media Arts in London I was looking for someone to teach a workshop on Pure Data to some artists there and when asking around, the names of two GOTO10 members, Antonios Galanopoulos and Chun Lee, kept coming up. I booked them to teach the workshop and when we were communicating about system requirements in advance, we had to run through a checklist of externals and settings to make sure all our OSX Apple machines were going to work and be compatible with what they were teaching. It took a bit of time to get all the machines running in the same way and Antonios told me about this project they were working on that would eliminate a lot of that work. And, interestingly, it could also run on a LiveCD where people could take the software and system home with them to continue their work. A big bonus for us as we wanted to see our participants, often from very different backgrounds, continue their learning so the workshops would have legacy for them. That wasn’t always possible if they had to buy proprietary software or get a full Linux system working at home. An increased, meaningful uptake in technology tools by wider groups of people was where I saw the culture meaning in this project.

My imagination was captured by the idea of an operating system by media artists for media artists. Artists all work in different ways of course, but there were (and are) definitely a set of tools that many of the artists I knew were using in common (Pure Data being a big one at the time). I was interested in something that could draw together those tools in a way that was optimized for the way artists work, and also saw an opportunity for media labs like the ones I had worked in to input into the development of a system that was close to their needs as well. So although the FLOSS ideology is a big part of the pure:dyne project, I was initially more interested in it from a functional, not political, point of view. Also a community-building point of view. I imagined a network of media labs (like the ones I worked in) and artists taking collective ownership over a system that was optimized for the way they work, learning from one another and creating a common platform. That was where I saw the meaning for my field of work.

In terms of my own involvement: I hadn’t seen a group of artists who were working so closely with the mainstream/wider FLOSS communities before to create something that was ‘up to speed’ with wider technical communities i.e. not just art. pure:dyne isn’t an artwork, it’s a
tool, and I was interested in how a bunch of artists had the technical capacity to make something that functioned as such. Real h4x0r stuff, but also interesting to watch them develop the system as a bona fida FLOSS project and not an artwork inspired by FLOSS. I learned about the day-to-day, boring parts of how FLOSS projects work. It’s an elaborate, structured, disciplined, interesting working system – not just all love and openness. But what it seemed like is that when the pure:dyne team would get together they would have fun joking around about the things they were working on and *making* things. The developer team all became friends and the work was not always fun but doing it together, especially crammed in a small room and sharing links and snacks, looked like it would be. So I basically just wanted to get in on the party and they graciously took me on as a developer. 🙂

Aymeric will have more, from the artist perspective and the longer history…

Aymeric Mansoux:

Hi Everyone, and thanks Marc for the invitation.

marc garrett said :
> So, I would like to kick off this discussion by asking Heather
> Corcoran or Aymeric Mansoux why they decided to get involved with
> pure:dyne and what it means to them, as practitioners in their own
> field, and what it means to them culturally?

My decision to be involved with the project was quite simple: I started it 😉

So maybe I could explain how this all happened and in which context pure:dyne was created, which might give some hints on the cultural aspect.

I think Heather’s answer’s about pure:dyne as a workshop platform is a very good introduction because it is what motivated the creation of pure:dyne in the first place, and still remains a strong component of the project.

For the last 5 years GOTO10 has been involved in organising/producing workshops on free software and digital art. The software we used to teach, or the software we were teaching at the time was running on GNU/Linux and on top of that was not easy to get running or install
even within a GNU/Linux distribution. As a consequence, it was usual for us to come an entire day before a workshop and install all the machines with Debian or Gentoo and compile the software needed (no packages for the software taught). It was a real nightmare and it was very common to only finish in the middle of the night or early morning. It was impossible for us to communicate to the host’s technical team or admin what to do as it required a lot of last-minute hacking and improvisation to get everything installed properly, not to mention the fact that we could not just say to the people who invited us “install a full OS, recompile kernel modules if necessary, and when you’re done, here is the list of libs and applications you need to compile, see you tomorrow”. It was also impossible to have a “bring-your-own-laptop” setup as we would have to sacrifice a big chunk of the workshop to install things on the participants’ machines (more time because instead of fixing 10-20 times the same type of
machine, we would have to deal with 10-20 different laptops). We tried this once and it was a failure, we almost had no time left to teach and an important number of participants broke their install/windows/whatever and didn’t even have anything running after 3 days (we fixed everything in the end, everyone came back home happy, but you get the point…). Another downside was that we were teaching software we knew that it would be hard for our participants to install, and as a consequence very unlikely to use and to learn further when they went back home. Only a few survived during this pre-pure:dyne dark ages.

Tough love, yes, but it was the only thing we knew, until a certain day…

I think it was in 2004 (or close) that Marloes de Valk organised a Pure Data workshop at Montevideo/NIMK in Amsterdam, in which I was teaching, and where I met Jaromil http://dyne.org. He showed me the dyne:bolic liveCD that he was developing and I was quite impressed to see a whole system running from a CD that was able to detect and configure itself automatically to work on a good number of different machines. Similarly, a few years before Jaromil was impressed when he got introduced to the bolic1 liveCD from LOA and which became later both a base and inspiration for dyne:bolic.

What happened next was obvious. In just an afternoon, we added Pure Data and a couple of externals to dyne:bolic. To be honest, I was just pointing him to the right sources and the right configure flags, and he did all the integration very quickly. We ended up with a new minor release of dyne:bolic that we used a couple of times in workshops with an “ok” success rate. I say “ok” success rate and not good, nor excellent because, while it was very easy for Jaromil to rebuild a new CD with some changes, it was very difficult for anyone else to do so. dyne:bolic was a big hack and was strongly entangled with Jaromil’s hard-drive 🙂

The side-effect of this, was that we could not update the CD to support more hardware, we could not update Pure Data, we could not add more externals etc, unless I would ask Jaromil to make this or this change, which I did for a little while, but it was not handy at all. Yet, during this transition phase we started to use the liveCD, doing a mix of dyne:bolic/debian/gentoo depending on the software taught and the machines provided. It sounds a bit messy, and it was, but the addition of the live CD saved us a lot of time and simplified quite a few things.

Some months later, I had a chat with Jaromil in ASCII and we talked about this issue, and he mentionned to me that he was planning to work on a SDK and a core that would allow to create a new dyne:bolic. So the new dyne:bolic would be rewritten and updated and would be based on a lower subsystem and scripts called dyne:II. It was obviously interesting for us, and because I was quite into Pd at the time being, the name pure:dyne came. So, in brief, pure:dyne was going to be built on top the dyne:II core but maintained by GOTO10. The 1st person to join me was another GOTO10 member, Chun Lee and almost immediately after, Antonios Galanopoulos, also from GOTO10.

Very quickly we used pure:dyne as a default solution to be able to teach workshops in all kind of different situations, reducing install parties (read nightmare) to only last minute quick fixes. The added bonus was that we could tell the host organisation to download the liveCD, test it on their machines, and if necessary we could make immediately some modifications to make it work. Last but not least, participants were going back home with a liveCD that had good chances to work on their hardware and they could go on learning on their own without disrupting their main operating system habits/etc..

From a practitioner’s point of view, while we were fine-tuning pure:dyne, we started to go really into details to the point where some of us stopped using their regular GNU/Linux distro to only use pure:dyne as their main operating system. After all, pure:dyne was supposed to provide a stable system, high performance and a unique collection of exotic software. So why would we just use that to only teach?

Antonios was the first one to make the complete switch, and I followed a little bit after. pure:dyne was not anymore just a teaching platform, it became our operating system, the one we used for our live performances, installations, and any of our artistic projects or experiments. This boosted dramatically the project because we were confronted to it everyday, and any fixes or enhancement or new features that we added “as artist needs” or just “daily user” was immediately available in a new version of the liveCD. At this point things started to go very fast, and we started to modify the core system, the scripts, updating large chunks of the system, stripping things out, adding some bits and bytes, etc. Ending up with a system that was in fact a sort of snapshot of our constantly evolving needs and even mood changes.

I could tell you, that since the beginning we had this grand vision of the ultimate software artist environment and that we worked hard to make it happen, of course we thought about it, but just like many other things completely unrelated. So saying it was an initial goal or that we felt the need to fullfill a particular demand we had carefully observed would be lying. As Heather said, and what I find fantastic about working on this type of free software project, is that you just initiate something, it develops itself organically, and you see a whole new world unfold in front of you. We did not try hard, we just followed the flow.

In GOTO10, the social and political aspect of free software is very important and is implicit/embedded in every of our projects, but from the perspective of the initial pure:dyne impulse, all this was pretty much very utilitarian and self-centered, it seemed, because we designed a platform to teach our workshops and make our art and we did not really expected what was coming around the corner, or said differently we did not pay too much attention.

The project was obviously GPL, we had a website with ISO downloads since the beginning, a public mailing list, etc. So even if the project was mostly directed by our own interests and personal needs, the whole proces was entirely visible/open. Of course we were announcing new releases, and communicating a bit on the project, but this was just a matter of telling what was on our system, waiting for people to try it out and give us some feedback.

And then one day, they started to arrive …
… out of nowhere …
… our first regular users 🙂

Except that they were not any type of users, they were artists, who had in fact very similar needs to ours. From teaching, to using the system for performances/installation, and even using it as main operating system.

Then, things started to get more complicated 🙂

Rhea Myers:

> Except that they were not any type of users, they were artists, who
> had in fact very similar needs to ours. From teaching, to using the
> system for performances/installation, and even using it as main
> operating system.

I recently tried out the pure:dyne live CD and I loved the feel of the system. So one of the things I wanted to ask was whether pure:dyne is suitable for use as a main OS, and I’m pleased to see that it is.

You mention that pure:dyne emerged from practical necessity and didn’t have a grand plan. Did you design its user experience with any model or set of requirements in mind? It reminds me of the clean, pleasurable, no-nonsense environments of old Mac and SGI systems. Was that intentional or a product of evolution in a similar niche?

And on a boring practical level, now that pure:dyne is Debian based can I just install Debian packages or is pure:dyne a different package universe? I’m using Fedora on my laptop at the moment and I’m frustrated by the lack of some music and animation software as packages for it.

Aymeric Mansoux:

Hi Rob,

> You mention that pure:dyne emerged from practical necessity and didn’t
> have a grand plan. Did you design its user experience with any model
> or set of requirements in mind? It reminds me of the clean,
> pleasurable, no-nonsense environments of old Mac and SGI systems. Was
> that intentional or a product of evolution in a similar niche?

It was a natural thing to do.

We’ve always been working on minimal environments, which, to paraphrase the UNIX philosophy, needs to do one thing and one thing well. In the context of windows manager that implies to be able to spawn terminals and start applications, preferrably with as less mouse interaction as possible. Nothing else 🙂

To give you an idea, the wm we like to use are:
– evilwm http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm
– dwm http://www.suckless.org/dwm
– ratpoison http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison
– awesome http://awesome.naquadah.org

Of course, the wms above can be a bit disorientating for people that come from an OS that has a wm built around the desktop metaphor. That’s why we decided to provide by default XFCE, which is a desktop oriented windows manager, but comes with very little bloat. So although the other minimal wms are provided, we had to start right away with something that workshop participants could interact with, based on their experience with commercial operating systems, but at the same time light and “to the point”. It was discussed that we would just not use any desktop and even tried to run some workshops using one of these minimal wm, but it was too much of a shock. The good thing is that we converted quite a few users to these minimal wm anyway because they are very handy on a daily basis but also to provide a simple performance setup or an installation.

The second aspect of this choice, whether it is with a minimal wm or a light desktop, is the need to have a system that takes as little resources as possible. When we run <insert-your-fav-software-here>, we want the machine to allocate as much resources as possible to <insert-your-fav-software-here> and certainly not to a collection of 3D effects, twirling icons, wobbly windows and others industry sponsored gimmicks. Our aim was right away to provide a fully functionnal environment to systems as modests as an old Pentium III.

For the gory tech details, we also use i686 optimisations when compiling and we have been the first to provide a RT kernel on a live distribution. We also try to make this effort available for others, for example our upcoming new release will feature a kernel which config will be used as a base config for an attempt to provide a unified linuxaudio kernel that would be shared amongst several multimedia distributions. (that is for those who are interested in this collaboration).

> And on a boring practical level, now that pure:dyne is Debian based
> can I just install Debian packages or is pure:dyne a different package
> universe? I’m using Fedora on my laptop at the moment and I’m
> frustrated by the lack of some music and animation software as
> packages for it.

It’ s not boring at all. It’s a key characteristic of the new pure:dyne. pure:dyne is a mix of 3 repos, Debian Lenny, Debian Multimedia and our own repository, so you can use pure:dyne repos on a Debian install, and you can add Debian repos on a pure:dyne install. Afterall, this is Debian.

With the previous version, our users, were either beginners or experts, so 2 groups with little common points and both at the extreme of a normal distribution. For beginners, pure:dyne was great to discover GNU/Linux and some of the exotic software bundled with it. But as soon as they wanted to make the switch to use the system more regularly or as main OS, they would miss several software that:
– we were not packaging
– and, we had no interest in packaging, or no time to do it
– and, would require “advanced” knowledge to package themselves.

So such users would only use pure:dyne for special case and never as main OS, due to the technical knowledge required to make it fit to their daily needs. We did package some generic stuff though, for example OpenOffice, but this is not exciting and a bit a waste of time. Just like I said in the previous mail, we were using pure:dyne as main OS so the choice of generic software and design was modelled around our own needs, and while the software we packaged was common to many artists, the environment itself is often a matter of taste and personal habits.

With a Debian based environment we are now able to provide a system that is very modular and that more importantly grow as the user’s knowledge grow.

In a nutshell, we have now 4 levels of usability:

– live* modes (liveCD, liveDVD, liveHD, liveUSB) provides a read-only system that can be booted from different medium and in which you can access to your hard drives to read/write files.

– persistence modes, added to the live modes, they allow the user(s) to save their home content, or if configured, any changes done to the OS, including adding extra software. This persistence can be a partition on a disk, but also on a USB key or a file on a windows
partition (this feature is being tested atm)

– full installation, we have a documentation explaining how to install debian and add the same settings as on the live* systems, so you can have a “proper” installation and use the debian package manager to update the system, including receiving new packages from our repos.

– custom, for advanced Debian/Ubuntu users, they can just grab software
from our repository, including the kernel.

It is good to note that the package manager can also be used in the live* modes, of course without persistence, the added software will be lost at the 1st reboot, but it can be very useful to be able to pull a software from debian during a live session, or even a driver, etc.

Bob Catchpole:

Art forms have their technical aspects. Artists are forever learning, playing, working and experimenting with the technology at their disposal. Tools for the job. Means and ends. Artists are largely focused on the latter; the ability to use the tools is presumed.

However when it comes to digital/new media/net art, discussion of the technical aspects still seems to predominate. Do you think that’s in the nature of the technology? Or will there come a time when ‘new media’ artists won’t have to talk like Formula 1 engineers?

Marc Garrett:

Hi Bob, Heather, Aymeric & all,

I think that Bob has raised one of the most important questions that many artists ask themselves in respect to using technology as part of their art and those who are interested in exploring it further as a contemporary practice. This question can also be extended to those who wish to curate it and critique it as well, not forgetting audiences.

So my next question is, Rob’s question 😉

Heather Corcoran:

Hello,

I imagine Bob’s question came from Aymeric’s somewhat technical last response. I think its important to remember that, as I mentioned in my first answer, pure:dyne is a tool and not an artwork. Bob’s question was about the discussion of artwork and I don’t think it exactly applies because of this. Naturally a discussion about a tool might turn technical, especially if it’s a relatively new one that people are (luckily) interested in trying for themselves.

But to answer the question more broadly, it can of course help when audiences understand some formal aspects of a medium an artwork is made in. It’s not just media arts. Luckily for media artists, the uptake of technology is happening not only in our field but in society as a whole 🙂

I’m reminded of something Olia Lialina said recently, paraphrasing her paraphrasing herself, that net art never used to make sense in a gallery years ago, but now we can surely imagine that gallery audiences have just got up from their computers – so they understand the references and the context. Audiences are becoming more comfortable with technological references so discussion around media artworks may not seem so obscure for much longer.

To bring this back to pure:dyne you could turn it into an accessibility question. Not whether *discussion* around media art must always be at the level of Formula 1 engineers, but whether the artists must be Formula 1 engineers themselves. Do all media artists need to have the deep technical understanding that someone like Aymeric does, to the point where they can build their own tools like pure:dyne? Depending on your definition of media arts, but mine doesn’t even require that artwork uses a single piece of technology. The technical discussion around pure:dyne might be off-putting for some, but part of the reason for moving to the Debian system, as Aymeric laid out, was so that it could be more accessible to more people. The aim of pure:dyne is not that everyone needs to be an expert to use the tool.

For example see Aymeric’s discussion about the window manager (i.e. the desktop interface) we chose. But our accessibility choices will hopefully lead you closer to, not further from, a true understanding of how the tool you are using works. In short, you don’t have to understand what repositories and packages are in order to open up applications in pure:dyne and start using them. We’re happy to have a great group of partners across the UK who use pure:dyne with their local, varied, communities – young people, older people, all different backgrounds.

But of course this leads into the concept the Beige collective call intentional computing. The idea that artists should learn about the tools they’re using down to the very core (code) elements in order to truly have control over what they’re creating. No Photoshop filters but hand-coded effects; even the operating system pushes you to make certain aesthetic choices. So maybe you do want to learn a bit more about how we’ve built pure:dyne if you want to have full control over what you’re making and how it runs. Otherwise, at least be consoled that the ones
making those choices are artists like you 🙂

Aymeric Mansoux:

Hi Bob, Marc, list

> “Art forms have their technical aspects. Artists are forever learning,
> playing, working and experimenting with the technology at their
> disposal. Tools for the job. Means and ends. Artists are largely
> focused on the latter; the ability to use the tools is presumed.”
>
> “However when it comes to digital/new media/net art, discussion of the
> technical aspects still seems to predominate. Do you think that’s in
> the nature of the technology? Or will there come a time when ‘new
> media’ artists won’t have to talk like Formula 1 engineers?”

Short answer:

There will be indeed a time ‘new media’ artists won’t have to talk like Formula 1 engineers. But not because their discourse has changed, but because their lingo will have been absorbed in popular culture, or on the other hand made completely obsolete just like the technology they once used. (which is why it is always difficult to talk about “new media” without any context attached to it)

Long (non)answer:

As Heather just said, my previous post was a technical answer to a technical question, and indeed pure:dyne is a platform to allow us, and a few others, to make art or anything creative with artistic software. But this platform is not art. It’s a software environment (and I won’t
get into the neoclassical code as craft thing either).

Back to the question, I don’t know if it can be answered or not. As it is formulated now, it’s very difficult to come up with something that would be really satisfying because it might carry a couple of cans of worms attached to it.

For example, I believe it is not possible to generalise on the fact that technical aspects predominate in new media art, without first making a distinction between, on the one hand, artists operating in the field of new media with a complete technology illiteracy and who need technicians to implement their concept, and on the other hand, artists who can code and coders who make art. That sounds trivial, but it’s often forgotten or left as a detail from the art perspective. But in my eyes it’s very relevant.

In the 1st case the technological factor is little or not present because the artist see the technic as just a support or an enabler to illustrate an idea/concept. Nothing new, and it’s something common no matter from which angle it is seen: from the relationship contemporary conceptual artists and designers have with craftmanship, or from the engineers/artists post E.A.T. collaborative dreams point of view.

In the second group, though, “artists who can code and coders who make art” it is true that technology is predominant, but this *not* predominant compared to something else that would be in minority, such as art. It is predominant because it *is* art, the good old concept/technic dichotomy cannot apply here, and any attempt will end up in this deadlock where one will try to look for something which is right under his nose.

Of course, there are important variations within this field as well. For example an artist who can program might build an imaginary based on a very badly programmed, but creative software art, or an artistic interpretation of technology that would sound like pseudoscience. At the other extreme, a programmer making art will have the tendency to focus much more be in the technical process and the manifestations of these underlying mechanics would be treated as side effects or illustrations of these.

In real life, such extremes exists, but things are generally a bit more balanced, but what is important is that in both cases software is seen as something much closer to a medium rather than something like a tool.

It is up to an artist to stay in the safe frame of the “material>tool>object” instruments and the multimedia metaphors (digital paint, virtual canvas, etc) or to decide to explore what software as artistic medium has to offer. In this situation the technology is either
transparent or its structure used as platform to reflect upon an idea. The understanding of software as technology is mandatory here of course. But what seems to appear as a mass of overwhelming technical information is just language to express and explore ideas that cannot be expressed otherwise.

Marc Garrett:

Hi Heather, Aymeric & all,

Thank you for your answers so far,

As the global, economical crisis seeps deeper into people’s lives everywhere. More are questioning their own approaches to living, and many are reconsidering their social values after the breakdown of these capitalist, (free) market-led frameworks and the attitudes that once supported them. It has been mentioned on various news channels that East Germans are now flocking to buy Das Kapital by Karl Marx. “A recent survey found 52 per cent of eastern Germans believe the free market economy is “unsuitable” and 43 per cent said they wanted socialism rather than capitalism, findings confirmed in interviews with dozens of ordinary easterners.” Link.

Perhaps East Germany is an easy target for declaring that social change is occurring, but there is something in the air. So, considering the current state of things and the impact of economies collapsing around us, do you think that this climate adds extra weight for more people to use (FLOSS) Free/Libre/Open Source Software and pure:dyne, if so why?

James W. Morris:

Hi,

I’m curious about how pure:dyne might compare to other multimedia distributions. I have always gone back to Debian (stable) as my main OS, but have tried 64studio… and another, can’t remember it’s name, it used fluxbox as it’s desktop but the distro died, but the desktop was fast and it all worked from go.

Does pure:dyne come in 64-bit flavour? (and any chance of ordering a live/install DVD btw?)

> Of course there are important variations within this field as well. For
> example an artist who can program might build an imaginary based on a
> very badly programmed, but creative software art, or an artistic
> interpretation of technology that would sound like pseudoscience. At the
> other extreme, a programer making art will have the tendency to focus
> much more be in the technical process and the manifestations of this
> underlying mechanics would be treated as side effects or illustrations
> of these.

I found this quite interesting. If neither programming nor art is earning one a living, how can one tell if they’re a programmer making art or an artist writing code? Hang on, there’s a clue at the end of the paragraph… Yes I agree there, with the illustrations analogy.

Aymeric Mansoux:

Hi Marc,

Well it’s obvious that the current situation is an occasion for all the grow-your-own, do-it-yourself, open and free cultures to be under the spotlight. Although during this process there will be a lot of reinvinting the wheel and re-discoveries, it’s still of course a very good thing and might present alternative future for our societies, by breaking down hierarchic glass structures into more “meshy” robust heterarchic systems.

Unfortunately, maybe I am bit too pessimistic, but I suspect that just like usual, only the most educated groups will benefit from this. The masses will be served the usual soup. “we will do everything we can, to fix the issue, and it’s together that we will get out of this crisis” will be copy/pasted all over the place, which usually means introducing more contol and less freedom to ensure the well-being of a few. Panem et circenses, over and over again.

From the cultural and artistic institutions point of view, things might be much better though. The obvious economy crisis and the current lack of funding/support for media arts (in its broadest definition), make platform like pure:dyne very attractive to run a multimedia lab using shiny imacs or just a bunch of recycled PC. Even if FLOSS get introduced only for cost reasons, it is still good as it will show it has more to offer in the long term. From a social point of view, a FLOSS lab is more ethical as well: your budget, even if grandly reduced, will go to a part-time admin, a freelance developer, a GNU/Linux hacker, who will in turn contribute back to the development of the software you use. In such a case you are supporting directly a human being with direct feedback in the community, instead of injecting more money for company shareholders.

The position of the artist, on the other hand is probably the most ambiguous. The way I see it, is that artists would use FLOSS for 3 different reasons (non-exclusive).
– money saving
– technological advantage
– politics, activism

Now the problems is that in fact money saving is not a problem. Let’s be honest most artists are attached to their digital tools … but not as much to their licenses. The majority of artists always find a way to not have to pay for a license, and nowadays you don’t need to belong to a private torrent tracker community or to scene top site to get your daily dose of binaries, anyone who knows how to formulate a search expression in Google can get virtually anything in a click. So the advantage of FLOSS here is very little.

Another problem is that, it is very likely that if an artist is at the same time already an activist and fond of technology, we can safely assume he knows about FLOSS and already uses it. I don’t remember seeing any Microsoft hacktivist … ever … 🙂

So in the end what could bring an artist to change his toolset/environment is to access a new field of possibilities. This doesn’t mean the two other situations are completely leading to a logic dead-end, but we can assume they are not the most important cause. In such a situation the economic context would have very little influence. To embrace FLOSS, artists must be able to see what is has to offer that is not available elsewhere (from practical issues, to social aspects and knowledge sharing) and this only needs curiosity and a good dose of self motivation.

Rhea Myers:

aymeric mansoux wrote:
> To embrace FLOSS, artists must be able to see what is has to
> offer that is not available elsewhere (from practical issues, to
> social aspects and knowledge sharing) and this only needs curiosity
> and a good dose of self motivation.

Do you think that artists should extend the freedom of free software into their artistic work? Is there an obligation or inspiration from free software for artists to embrace copyleft? Or is it only the case that artists should use and contribute to software freely?

Heather Corcoran:

Just briefly to add to what Aymeric is saying here (brief because we’re preparing for our pure:dyne event tomorrow night, 23rd at 6:30pm – please join us! – at Mute HQ in London, and Aymeric has said lots here that I agree with). Coincidentally I’ve just been doing some work around this for an upcoming exhibition at FACT on (un)sustainability issues, taking a wider view of environmental sustainability in this present moment – from peak oil to peak credit – and while maybe its not obvious at first, FLOSS communities do have a place in this debate. Chris Carlsson quotes Will Doherty at the opening of one of the chapters in his book Nowtopia: “The open source community is pretty much tech support for the revolution, if you will, or tech support for the new society”. As Aymeric calls them, the ‘grow-your-own, do-it-yourself,
open and free cultures’, FLOSS being one of many, do something besides provide products that will be accessible to all in the wake of economic recession – they build a network of individuals gaining practical experience organising outside of this particular capitalist framework. Read the FLOSS chapter of the Carlsson book if you come across it, its decent at talking about this with specific reference to Marxist thought, since Marx has come up now. 🙂

Aymeric Mansoux:

Hi James,

james jwm-art net said :
> I’m curious about how pure:dyne might compare to other multimedia
> distributions. I have always gone back to Debian (stable) as my main OS,
> but have tried 64studio… and another, can’t remember it’s name, it
> used fluxbox as it’s desktop but the distro died, but the desktop was
> fast and it all worked from go.

maybe it was demudi?

We used fluxbox in the very early pure:dyne iterations, but we quickly realised that during workshops we really need something that provides as much graphical helpers as possible. XFCE is good for that, it’s very light and fast on modest machines and has a complete desktop. Also, even though fluxbox is really good, it’s one of these desktop that is not minimal enough to provide a barebone wm, and it’s too minimal to provide a user experience similar to what is available in typical desktop-based wm.

Concerning Debian, I can’t recall if I mentionned it previously, our goal is also not to leave our packages in a nich repository, the mid term plan for the pure:dyne team is to start moving as much things as possible in Debian itself, so it will benefit to an even wider audience.

> Does pure:dyne come in 64bit flavour? (and any chance of ordering a
> live/install DVD btw?)

pure:dyne is 32bit only at the moment, which of course works perfectly fine on 64bit CPU. We’ll start exploring 64bit when we consider the live system and the environment that produces it, are stable enough and well documented.

We are also in discussion with 64studio, who contacted us a while ago, to start to think about long term collaboration.

There are no CD/DVD available to order, it’s only available as direct downloads or torrents.
http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/wiki/GetPureDyne

But, the next milestone, leek and potato, will be available as live USB keys that we will sell. We’re still trying to figure out how to do that with as little extra cost added to make it cheap but sustainable. For those in London tonight, you can get one or see it in action.

I think the issue with software art is that it is interdisciplinary, which is, at the same time, its greatest quality but also its curse. It is still too often that today, software artists are left in an academe/institutional limbo because they are either considered too geeky or too arty, depending the point of view of the single discipline that examines it. But I think it is a general problem for any (multi|cross|trans|inter)disciplinary practice and research 🙂

Aymeric Mansoux:

Hi Rob,

Rhea Myers said :
> To embrace FLOSS, artists must be able to see what is has to
> offer that is not available elsewhere (from practical issues, to
> social aspects and knowledge sharing) and this only needs curiosity
> and a good dose of self motivation.
>
> Do you think that artists should extend the freedom of free software
> into their artistic work? Is there an obligation or inspiration from
> free software for artists to embrace copyleft? Or is it only the case
> that artists should use and contribute to software freely?

Well, artists are quite known to do whatever they want to do with whatever comes around, so this won’t change 🙂 (and it’s a good thing!) So I think at the moment most artists are using and contributing to software freely, which as a consequence leads very often to paradoxes such as “I use free software to make art, but I won’t release the patch/code of my installation/performance”.

There is still this idea, that giving away the technology/software of the artwork, is giving away the income (maybe the soul too?). This is not true, as we know, media artists incomes are mostly coming from teaching, residency, comissions and manifestations of their art, whether it is performances or installations, certainly not selling software or registering patents (and we also know what this thinking brought us so far in other fields).

But I have good hope, or said differently, I’m looking forward to the day where critical mass of artists making free software art will be reached, and hopefully will start to generate interesting things. Free software art is not making software art a better Art, but it will certainly allow it to develop itself in ways we can only speculate about right now, based on how it affected other domains until now.

Also, just like the rest, the freedom of free software is a quite powerful virus, not just for the viral licensing aspect, but also for the mind. Artists who are operating for a while in its presence, very often start to introduce it in their work and their research, as an inspiration and method.

Interview ends.

Also just published – FLOSS+Art:
http://goto10.org/flossart/

FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.

Compiled and edited by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk.

With contributions from: Fabianne Balvedi, Florian Cramer, Sher Doruff, Nancy Mauro Flude, Olga Goriunova, Dave Griffiths, Ross Harley, Martin Howse, Shahee Ilyas, Ricardo Lafuente, Ivan Monroy Lopez, Thor Magnusson, Alex McLean, Rhea Myers, Alejandra Maria Perez Nu?ez, Eleonora Oreggia, oRx-qX, Julien Ottavi, Michael van Schaik, Femke Snelting, Pedro Soler, Hans Christoph Steiner, Prodromos Tsiavos, Simon Yuill.

ABOUT PURE:DYNE:

pure:dyne is an operating system developed to provide media artists with a complete set of tools for realtime audio and video processing. pure:dyne is a live distribution, you don’t need to install anything. Simply boot your computer using the live CD and you’re ready to start
using software such as Pure Data, Supercollider, Icecast, Csound, Fluxus, Processing, and much much more.

http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/

pure:dyne will work on any PC laptop, desktop, and single-board computers, including the intel-based Mac, Asus’ Eee PC, and any x86 netbooks.

pure:dyne is based on Debian and Debian Multimedia. All packages provided by pure:dyne can be used if you are running these flavours of GNU/Linux.

pure:dyne is: Rob Canning, Heather Corcoran, Antonios Galanopoulos, Karsten Gebbert, Claude Heiland-Allen, Chun Lee, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk

WHO USES PURE:DYNE?

pure:dyne is developed by artists, for artists. Our primary users are people like us, media artists who build all kinds of creative projects, using pure:dyne to do anything from recording and manipulating sound, making live visuals, creating interactive media in installations, and more. We use ‘artist’ as a broad term for anyone who is doing or wants to do something creative using their computer.

pure:dyne is also used by media art organisations across the world. Galleries, production centres, school departments and more are finding pure:dyne useful for teaching media art skills to their local communities.

http://320×200.goto10.org/

ABOUT HEATHER CORCORAN:

Heather Corcoran (CA/UK) is a curator/producer with a specialist in media art and music, currently working as Curator at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool. Recently she has worked at Space Media Arts in London and InterAccess Electronic Media Arts in
Toronto, as well as producing a number of freelance projects. She works hands on with technology and technology communities – currently a Developer of the free software project pure:dyne, the GNU/Linux distribution for media art; co-organizer of Dorkbot London; and a
lurking-only member of OpenLab. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in New Media at Ryerson University in Toronto.

http://guests.goto10.org/~heather

ABOUT AYMERIC MANSOUX:

Aymeric Mansoux (FR) is an artist and musician, member of the GOTO10 collective (http://goto10.org). His main artistic and research interests revolve around online communities, software as a medium and the influence of FLOSS in the development and understanding of digital art. His most recent projects and collaborations include 0xA the file repository based music project with Chun Lee (https://code.goto10.org/hg/0xa/), the digital artlife Metabiosis project with Marloes de Valk (http://metabiosis.goto10.org) and the pure:dyne GNU/Linux live distribution for media artists (http://puredyne.goto10.org). Aymeric is editor of the FLOSS+Art book (OpenMute 2008) as well as Folly’s Digital Artists’ Handbook which was launched early 2008.

Wander any of the world’s increasingly deserted urban jungles- the empty downtown streets and avenues of crumbling wealth and you can still count on being ambushed regularly by apparently lunatic vagabonds. The lucky creatures who are still too in touch with their own reality. Homeless, heedless and helpless folks so in touch, in fact, that their shrill, mumbled diatribes spew shared truths. Ragged creatures on dissolving cement street corners give voice to our universal discontent. A scorching unhappiness buried beneath the quotidian blankness of our cellular culture.

The zombies glued to portable communication devices numbly dismissing each other in the fast lanes of the city sidewalks can still be jolted out of their crowded isolation by the ravings of people who by circumstance and poverty cannot avoid the world.

G.H. Hovagimyan a Performance and New Media artist based in New York has harnessed the power of this seething population. His ongoing Rant series started in the 70’s. In the raging shadows of punk and performance art, these works have evolved in their content while maintaining the raw energy and volume of the first recorded rant.

…What follows is an interview with G.H. by Eliza Fernbach a fellow member of the New York Collective ArtistsMeeting.

Rant Interview – Eliza Fernbach

EF:
Why did rant begin?

GH:
I was doing performance art in the 1970’s. The first rant I did was a performance at Artists Space in 1977 at an exhibition called ‘Open Mic’. The piece was called Rich Sucker Rap. It was a punk performance piece. It was very aggressive and confrontational. I was drumming in a punk band at the time. I used rock drumbeats as the basis for the piece. The words were simple repetitive rants like; fuck you rich suckers give me your money and no money, no art and art whores, artists as whores, whose art. I repeated the phrases as fast as possible sort of like a country auctioneer but the words were effectively drumbeats.

Later that year I was invited by Jean Dupuy and Davidson Gilgliotti to do a performance for a videotape called, Chant Acapella, I did the Rich Sucker Rap. This tape was a series of two minute performances by young performance artists. Among them were people like, Laurie Anderson, Charlemagne Palestine and Julia Heyward. The video was shown at the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition called video-views. At the private opening (to which I was not invited), some of the patrons were so offended they asked for the piece to be removed from the show. The tape Chant Acapella is now in the Electronic Arts Intermix catalog. A few years ago I asked for a copy and was told I had to rent the tape and dub it myself. Which I did. I then digitized it and have included the Rich Sucker Rap in many exhibitions. I have a copy on my cellphone. The piece was also included in a cellphone video show at the Pompidou Center called, Pocket Films in 2007. They are also going to include my rantapod podcasts in this years (2008) exhibition. Of course I haven’t seen a penny for all this art work which reiterates the original rant. You have to be rich to make art.

EF:
What has been your most surprising response to a rant?

GH:
People say to me that the Rich Sucker Rap looks current and has meaning for them now, thirty years later.

EF:
Aside from “Rich Suckers” who and what inspires a rant?

GH:
There are several inspirations for the rants. They come out of Punk Rock lyrics but they are also informed by 1970’s video-performance practices. Another inspiration is the madman on the street. There was a guy in the early days of the new York Soho Art Scene who used to shout the headlines and rant about the government and anything else that came to mind. You can see these people in every country. They are hooked into the public discourse and the media-logos but they are psychotic and the boundaries between information and identity are fuzzy or non-existent. We all see and hear these street psychotics. They tend to speak the truth in an unfiltered way. It makes everyone uncomfortable. I’d also have to say that both the British bands like the Sex Pistols and X-Ray Spec and American bands like the Ramones were part of my inspiration. But my position was to make art rather than to try and be a pop star. On the other hand performance artists such as Vito Acconci were an inspiration but they were way too arty. I operate in the interstitial places. It gives me freedom. I’m always looking for a way to advance beyond what is proscribed at any given period of time.

EF:
Does it matter who is ranting?

GH:
Yes it does. Performance art is not acting. The best work springs from the need to heal or explore an emotional wound/crisis. The rant would have to involve an issue that the ranter can explore and also improvise on. It’s not a memorize by rote type of performance. The performer must be able to skate close to the edge of psychosis for the performance to be effective. That’s the difference between a genuine emotion and play-acting.

EF:
If you could have anyone else deliver a rant that you have created – or perform a brand new one who would you ask and what would it be about?

GH:
I would choose Eric Bogosian to deliver a rant. I would make it about genocide denial. Since I am Armenian and so is Eric it would be a particularly emotional work. The rants need to be painful for the performer in order to speak the truth. I could also get someone like Sinead O’Connor in that case it would be about damage to the earth/home soil. I can also see blood, lies and an end to manliness as a virtue for the subject of a rant.

EF:
Ok, I’m opening the floodgates…how did the project evolve? What is the history of the rant?

GH:
The rants are an ongoing project. I have already spoken of Rich Sucker Rap. That was the beginning of me using the idea of percussion instrumental structures and pop music postures in an art setting.

The next time I took up the issue was after I started working with computers in the 1990’s. I was working with web video and also teaching video streaming at the School of Visual Arts. I noticed that everyone was trying to figure out how to get the highest resolution and the best image for their video. I decided to do the total opposite simply to show that technology and all the bells & whistles are no substitute for hardcore performance. I did a piece called Entertain Me. It started from the premise of early video performance art that was in essence a person doing something in front of a video camera. The thing about live video is that it is immediate and involves a reflexive state of mind, you see yourself and are talking to yourself in some manner. I noticed that web cams and web chat often had your image in the chat window as well as the person you were chatting with. This allows you to see yourself. That’s a key feature of computer video. Anyway, I used a web cam and reduced the image to 8 bit black and white with a 10 fps compression. This gave the video an almost old black and white movie feeling. I then did a reflexive rant about people looking at screens and demanding to be entertained every minute. It was again very confrontational but then again I was simply talking to myself or my digital reflection.

Around 2000 Patrick Lichty curated an online show about handheld and PDA works. There weren’t any handheld devices that show video at that time. I was able to create videos for Palm OS with a small piece of software. I had it set up so that people could download the videos from the web onto their palm pilots. My notion was to do a series of rants concerning various topics. The idea was to deliver personal media rants a sort of rhizomatic information structure.

I was doing a lot of collaborative work with Peter Sinclair in France at the time. We did an interactive laser and sound installation called Shooter that was shown at Eyebeam here in New York in 2002. Peter got me to do a bunch of xenophobic rants for the piece. We later started a series of performance called rant/ rant back/ back rant. Peter & I sat at opposite ends of a long table. He had a computer with a sound manipulation program. I had a microphone. I prepared a psychotic rant based on news items that at the time involved the Iraq invasion, Abu Ghraib etc.. I would start ranting and Peter would grab snippets of my voice and through the phrases into the sound mix. This created a time shifted feedback that I then jammed on. We also did this in a remote performance format where I streamed video and audi from New York to Peter in Aix-en-Provence, France he then mixed the sound and sent it back via the web. I then Jammed off that system. We also did this in the Netherlands where we added a live video jamming component with a video mixing program.

EF:
Are there artists working in other media whose work you align the rants with?

GH:
The rants in and of themselves are language art works similar in some measure to what Jenny Holzer does but very different. I work with language and specifically language that is set in the media-logos. Much of this was talked about by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his postulates on specialized languages and also by Regis Debray in his Medialogy investigations. What I mean is that mass media language is different from poetry and literary traditions. I use the language of slang, advertising, propaganda, war and soldier short hand, construction lingo and song lyrics to build the message. The performative state is one of borderline psychosis that can be frightening and liberating at the same time. For example one of the more pithy phrases to come out of Abu Ghraib was the phrase, ghost detainees. This was a person who was captured but never bureaucratically processed into the prison. In some measure we are all ghost detainees of global capitalism hegemony. We don’t exist except to consume and produce.

EF:
And rant…here, there and everywhere?

GH:
After doing the rant performances with Peter I took up the issue of small video rants distributed over the Internet to handheld devices. I decided to do a series of video podcasts that people could download onto their video ipod. I began again with the idea of a person doing a mediation/ contemplation rant into a video camera. The subjects were anything I was thinking of or various types of Art Scene issues such as the Market or the death of the author/ artist or steroid monsters in the gym. What happened as I did these was that when I imported them into an editing program I noticed I could slice and sample the videos giving the rant/ mediation more impact. I began to realize that I could perform with the idea of cutting out and rearranging the parts in post production editing. I began to perform with a notion of what would happen with the digital effects. This would be similar to the idea of Charlie Chaplain doing a skating routine backwards and then playing the film forwards. I was performing for the computer rather than the camera. I also took up the notion of percussion by using small ticks an mistakes in my performance. A normal editor would take them out. What I did was sample them and then duplicate and multiply them as a rhythmic element. I then began to sample short phrases of my rants and then randomly reassembled the performances for the final video podcasts. What I found is that the mind assembles the meaning even if the sequences are jumbled.

EF:
What distinguishes the latest rants from the original 70’s templates?

GH:
The most recent rants are done in high definition video in collaboration with Brian Caiazza. Brian is a production and Adobe After Affects genius. He saw my rantapod and wanted to collaborate so we did a series of rants. He set up 3 cameras, a professional Sony HD, a consumer HD video camera and an SD video camera. We did two takes of every rant setting the cameras up first in a vertical line and then in a horizontal half circle. Brian then spent a month in after affects taking some of what I had proposed in my earlier rants, pushing the effects as far as he could.

EF:
Do you create rants all the time

GH:
At the moment I’m not doing any more rants. I’m Actually waiting to see what happens after the US Presidential election.

EF:
Who is your target audience?

GH:
That’s an odd question. I’m an artist so it would be anyone who is interested in experimental art. Let me make an opposite answer. I’m not interested in becoming a corporation sponsored pop star (at least not on their terms). I’m not interested in being entertaining. I am interested in having my works shown in an art context such as museums, galleries, project spaces, new media festivals etc..

The work is also accessible on the web so anyone can access it if they so desire. I don’t really make art for an audience. I make art for myself. This is a psychological process, and I feel curious or uncomfortable or I have an idea. I am also really uncomfortable with society, the social order and so on. What is most popular and attracts the greatest audience, I find boring and inconsequential. I find the arena of art to be the most intellectually and socially free. It is where there is a constant proposition of what the world might be or become. It is also a discourse on ideas. Art has nothing to do with capitalism and marketing other than we are in an economic system that uses those ideals. Indeed the notion of an audience implies a sales/ entertainment matrix. That is part of the larger consumer capitalist structure. I think that structure constricts art just as the Church as a patron restricts art to religious subjects.

EF:
Well, then if they aren’t going to find the rants in church, where will the interested audience access your work

I first got involved in the Internet because of its ability to go around the existing distribution systems for art. My video podcasts rantapod uses the Internet to do just that. If you have iTunes on your computer you can search for rantapod. It is listed in iTunes. Anyone can get these video performances and put them on their iPod. If you have an Apple TV box and an HD video screen you can see the video rants on your large screen TV. This means that my art can be displayed in the homes of people who have that type of technology. These new media distribution systems continue to evolve. So my rants function and are distributed to handheld devices, computer screens and flat screen TV’s.

G.H. Hovagimyan most recently ranted with fellow ArtistsMeeting member Lee Wells at the Democracy in America gathering at the Armory in New York City October 2, 2008.
He is reworking Godard’s film Alphaville in an online project called “Plazaville”.

Links —
rich sucker rap (mp4) http://nujus.net/gh/dupuy_print/rich_sucker_rap.mp4
Palm Rants — http://www.voyd.com/ia/pdagh.htm
entertainMe – http://medialab.ifc.com/film_detail.jsp?film_id=1496
EntertainMe – http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery5.html
Shooter – http://nujus.net/shooter-new-site/index-1.html
rant/ rant back/ back rant – http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery9.html
rantapod – http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod
HD Rants – http://nujus.net/gh_04/hd_rants/index.html
ARTISTSMEETING http://artistsmeeting.org

G.H. Hovagimyan
http://nujus.net/gh
http://artistsmeeting.org

Text by James Wallbank
Pictures by Michael Tesh
Design by Scott Hawkins
Access Space, 2008
ISBN 978-0-95500-913-6

Access Space is an open access media lab based in Sheffield. Access Space encourages people to learn how to use hardware re-used from local companies and Free Software from the GNU project and others. This saves money and builds skills. Those skills can then be shared to build a self-reliant and sustainable community around the lab.

Since being founded in the year 2000 Access Space has thrived where many community and government schemes have failed. This has drawn attention from groups eager to understand and reproduce its success. This has led to the Arts-Council-funded study “Grow Your Own Media Lab”, of which the final report is the graphic novel of the same name “Grow Your Own Media Lab (The Graphic Novel)” or GYOML for short.

GYOML is a 114-page A5 perfect-bound book. The cover is a vivid black and yellow composition. Part Principia Discordia, part Emigre, it will look equally at home in gallery bookshops and alternative press outlets. Curious browsers will be hard pressed to resist taking a look. Inside, the book is black & white throughout with an introductory text followed by alternating pages of titles and comic-book illustrations of case studies.

Most books that use a Creative Commons licence either don’t specify the licence or use one of the more restrictive licences. You’d be surprised how many cheerleaders for Free Software and Free Culture have restrictive licences on their books. Kudos to Access Space for getting the licence right (the copyleft “Attribution-ShareAlike” licence) and making sure that it’s explained clearly in the book’s front matter. This ensures that GYOML continues the Access Space ethos of sharing cultural and technological wealth in a principled and practical way.

The comic-book illustrations by Michael Tesh are in fanzine style, a characterful and evocative aesthetic for a small press publication. I found myself smiling at the clear inner thoughts of some of the people Tesh depicts, and if you meet one of Access Space’s personnel after seeing his depictions of them you’ll feel you already know them. What makes Tesh’s art the perfect illustration for the case studies is that he is an Access Space regular.

Rather than providing an instruction manual for using software, which the book’s introduction rightly points out would quickly become outdated, GYOML presents a series of case studies of lab users and the situations they encounter. The case studies include a shy teenager, a nervous work placement, a mature student and a refugee dissident, all people learning from and contributing to different aspects of the running of Access Space. This illustrates the value of Access Space’s approach and explains how, and more importantly why, to recreate it.

Despite not being a software manual, there is a surprising wealth of technical and administrative information delivered surprisingly painlessly mixed in with the case studies. Such as how and why to use computers that businesses will pay you to take away from them, how and why to use Free Software, and how and why to make a server to keep users’ work safe if one of those reclaimed computers breaks down. The names of Free Software operating system and art software is mentioned, as is how to learn more about them, so it is easy to find out more. And I didn’t know how to crimp an RJ-45 ethernet cable before reading GYOML. Now I do.

For all the talk of “grassroots activism” and “alternative governance” on mailing lists, in universities, and at conferences, there is often a disconnect between the rhetoric of technological radicalism and actually doing anything in society. We can learn a lot from Access Space’s determination to get their hands dirty and to use technology as a means to the end of empowering people. A few years ago I helped out at Remix Reading’s open access lab, which was inspired to adopt Access Space’s way of working, so I can say from personal experience that running a lab is a rewarding experience.

GYOML is an effective and persuasive exposition of the virtues of Access Space’s way of doing things. It is inspirational, unpretentious and informative. We need more like Access Space, and GYOML shows us how to do it. Let a thousand media labs bloom.

http://access-space.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:gyoml_01.5_150.pdf

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Canadian artist Jeremy Bailey recently completed a five week residency at Furtherfield.org which culminated with his first UK exhibition, The Jeremy Bailey Show at HTTP Gallery, in North London (Sept 19th – Oct 19th 2008). The centrepiece of this exhibition is ‘WarMail’ commissioned by HTTP/Furtherfield.org and completed during his residency.

As part of the residency experience Jeremy was invited to take part in an interview on the Netbehaviour list. We discussed the works in the exhibition and the critical approaches and contemporary contexts that inspire him to create his art work. We also discussed ‘WarMail’ which was performed with a participating audience at the HTTP Gallery at the opening night.

Marc Garrett:

A warm welcome to Netbehaviour Jeremy, I want to begin by discussing ‘WarMail’ which will be performed with a participating audience at the HTTP Gallery next Friday the 19th.

I am intrigued by the image that you are using to represent this project. It looks as if it might be referring to a Star Wars film poster, but I am sure that this is not the case. Could you enlighten us on how this image came about?

Jeremy Bailey:

Hi Marc, everyone,

The Logo is inspired by diverse sources, the primary purpose is for it to look and feel a lot like the contents of next Friday’s performance.

I work a lot in graphic arts and advertising and I often try and reflect current cultural trends/aesthetics in my own artwork work to discuss the interplay between the way information is designed and the way it is received. In other words, the way things look right now have a lot to do with the way things are right now and vice versa. I’m currently very interested in recent revivals in 80s aesthetics, especially the use of airbrushed 3d Wireframe models and the
combination of certain colours like the teal and red pictured in the logo. This look is obviously apparent in a lot of early videogames, and computer visualizations. I suppose it originally existed as a limitation of graphics power but evolved into an aesthetic that represents something else. I’ve also been looking at a lot of Op art and cold war computer interfaces.

For those more visual, below is a list of links to inspired sources.

Op Art, Richard Anuszkiewicz

Daft Punk, Alive Logo

Tron Poster

more Tron artwork

Kavinsky Album Art

Metallica Logo

American One Dollar Bill

Asteroids Deluxe Artwork

Iron Man, the movie’s computer interface

FA 18 Fighter cockpit

Rhea Myers:

Hi Jeremy,

I like the poster image as well.

> Tron

I find Tron fascinating because its striking aesthetic is the product of computers being mythologised by people with a limited technological understanding of computers but a keen understanding of how they were affecting popular culture.

Also of possible interest:

Atari’s Battlezone

WarGames

Airbrush Typography

Marc garrett:

Hi Jeremy,

It is interesting how well the main image that you have designed for ‘WarMail’, relates to the references you have posted. This shows an attention to fine detail, not just with respect to the colour used, but also the form and composition. The triangle used in ‘WarMail’ symbolically could be associated to the American One Dollar Bill (I’m using a shorter link here just to be practical for the list) http://tinyurl.com/6paf9x – it also seems fitting that the latin words ‘Novus ordo seclorum’ when translated mean ‘New Order of the Ages’. Scary stuff, almost Star Wars rhetoric.

“The phrase Novus ordo seclorum (Latin for “New Order of the Ages”) appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, first designed in 1782 and printed on the back of the American dollar bill since 1935…”

“The phrase is often mistranslated as “New World Order,” but the Latin for that phrase would be Novus Ordo Mundi.” Wikipedia – http://tinyurl.com/5jqgcs

So, I have two questions. The first is whether you were conscious of these connections?

The other is asking if you could share with us the context and processes of the ‘WarMail’ performance at the Gallery next Friday?

Jeremy Bailey:

Hey Marc,

1. Absolutely conscious. As I hinted the perception of some kind of order, some truth in everything that can be revealed is both interesting and hilarious to me. Mostly because the process involves a tremendous amount of abstraction, and therefore an acceptable amount of error. This error, or this incompleteness reflects strongly on my thoughts concerning artist ego. As in, the artist ego is a very precarious and fragile instrument that should likely never be played. Of course the audience’s willingness to accept a temporary fantasy is also integral. The whole situation just makes me smile. It’s so cute.

2. On Friday I will present a new performance called WarMail. It evolved from HTTP’s request for a piece that took collaboration into concern. I frankly have little tolerance for collaboration and it’s uber inclusive oxymoronic brother audience participation. My thought is, whatever version of collaboration you subscribe to, the outcome is usually the result of whatever interface you chose to work under. A jam band is a good example. A terrible interface that results in vomit inducing tedium for the audience. SO! with that in mind, I have written a new piece of software that I will demo with the help of the audience. The software is a “thin” email client. As in limited. It’s all interface and it plays a bit like a game of asteroids. Think war/office hybrid. It also takes most of the direct control away from me, the author, and puts me in the role of conductor, which is a nice way of thinking about what an interface actually does. As a group we will attempt to write an email to my mother, whom I haven’t seen in a while due to overseas travel. The interface is controlled by the groups voice and body movements. Of course, the audience could overthrow this decision, and herein lies the opportunity to examine our primal desire for conflict. Every collaboration is fraught with it, the project just tries to make this as direct and obvious as possible. So, on friday, using our collective shrieking and some dance moves we will decide to either get along and celebrate the woman who brought me into this world, or we will engage in a messy incoherent curse word peppered battle that leaves my mother wondering why she ever starting using the Internet. Either way, I think we’re going to have fun and we’re going to feel something strange.

Marc Garrett:

Hi Jeremy,

Rewinding back into the Star Wars theme just for a moment. I have just found out that the UK’s first Jedi course is on offer at Queen’s University Belfast in November. It “hopes to attract Star Wars fans and introduce them to the joys of continuing their education through open learning.”

It also claims to examine the “wider issues behind the Star Wars universe, like balance, destiny, dualism, fatherhood and fascism”.

Perhaps they would be interested in being part of the WarMail performance next Friday.
http://tinyurl.com/0

Will get back regarding your recent post very soon 🙂

Marc Garrett:

Hi Jeremy,

To answer 1.

Many on here (of course) would agree that the artist ego is a fragile instrument. There has been much explored around the artist ego and Sigmund Freud himself felt a personal connection to the artist Michelangelo.

In ‘Formulations regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning’ (1911), Freud writes that art “… brings about a reconciliation of the two principles [pleasure and reality] in a peculiar way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of his special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion he actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favourite he desired to be, without following the long, roundabout path of making real alterations in the external world. But he can only achieve this because other men feel the same dissatisfaction as he does with the renunciation demanded by reality, and because that dissatisfaction, which results from the replacement of the pleasure-principle by the reality principle, is itself part of reality.”
http://www.human-nature.com/free-associations/glover/chap1.html#8

The above rings true in some respect, yet it also informs us how a contemporary culture’s dominant values, play a large part in influencing perceptions and conclusions. Another thing I find interesting regarding the artist and ego, is that (personal) romanticism is an essential ingredient. This notion of the artist being a hero is a fascinating theme which I have personally experienced when I was much younger. Some of these moments are just too embarrassing and too tense to dwell on. It’s funny when reading older writings, because of the language, especially the (unconscious) masculine dominated, mannerisms. For instance, ‘he’ comes up may times in the article. Even though such concepts around the artist and ego are from long ago, I think that these psychological elements still remain.

>that should likely never be played…

…’this incompleteness reflects strongly on my thoughts concerning artist ego’.

I can definatley see this in some of your works, but one particular piece that springs to mind is ‘Srongest Man’ where you try to hold a camera at arms length.
http://www.jeremybailey.net/podcasts/strongestman.m4v – I will not explain anything about the video, I think it explains itself. Lets just say that there is plenty of angst in it 😉

As mentioned, I will post a response to the rest of the text later…

Jeremy Bailey:

marc,

kickn’ it up a notch with the Freud! great stuff.

The truth is, I started art school in the 90s and all of my profs taught identity politics work. Actually my first EVER studio class was called women in art (I was the only man in the course). So starting out I always felt as though I wasn’t allowed to make art. I wasn’t a victim of any societal prejudices or discrimination, I was a very happy privileged white man with very few cares. The type of work I make now, the type that casts me as an ignorant/naive modern artist playing with technology, was developed to try and create some justification for myself in an ocean of those more deserving than I. A friend of mine once commented in critique, “The more you win Jeremy, the more we lose.” I’ve always thought that was a nice statement.

jeremy

Marc Garrett:

Hi Jeremy,

Yes, I may do this every now and then. Not necessarily with Freud, but with other references, just to open things up but only if it feels relevant. With identity politics being such a primary influence, it sounds like your art education was a complex yet insightful beginning. I can imagine that in order to find a voice for your work, there has been much re-evaluation taking place. Do you think that going through the re-evaluative process of justification has helped or hindered your practice, in regards to your creative-identity and approach to what your artwork could of been?

Jeremy Bailey:

marc,

I think it’s healthy to re-evaluate, at least it’s healthy for me. It keeps me in check and appreciative of those around me. It has also heightened my critical awareness, not just of myself but of everything in my vicinity, which I think is what every artist should do. Ultimately if you’re not critical of yourself, how on earth can you be critical of others?

not sure what things could have been, I used to do a lot of impressionist landscape paintings in high school. I guess I could be in a rocky farmer’s field right now, watching the sun set and considering the beauty of the amber light catching the silhouette of a windswept pine.

Marc Garrett:

Hi Jeremy,

Thank you for taking part in the dialogue so far, it has been both enjoyable and illuminating.

Much of your work involves a GUI (Graphic User Interface). User interfaces as we generally experience them, provide components for users to communicate with a computer. The interface defines the boundary between software, the hardware device or a user. What is interesting is that you are actually within the interface as well, performing in these environments.

Could you talk about the relationship between you as the software developer and the software itself, within your performances?

VideoPaint 3.0

Jeremy Bailey:

Hey Marc,

It has always been very important for my image or the image of the user to be a part of the interfaces I create. My reason has a lot to do with my historical/theoretical approach. I have been exposed to a lot of 1970s performance video and have developed a very keen interest in the theoretical context of the period. Specifically, for what is termed “Performance for the Camera”. A popular term, but for those unfamiliar, it specifically refers to a state as described in Rosalind Krauss’ essay, The Aesthetic of Narcissism, in which the artist becomes part of a feedback loop between his or herself and the electronics of the camera. This creates a unique self awareness (reflectivity) that was not present prior to this time. The artist literally watches themselves (on a close circuit monitor) creating the work and responding simultaneously. To put this in perspective, take one step back in time and performances were created for live audiences (less feedback), take one step forward and we land in the digital era and our camera from the 1970s has become a computer (hyper feedback). I like to call what I do Performance for the Computer, and it necessitates a re-evaluation of some of the psychological paramters that artists were working with in the 1970s. There’s a lot of shit that happened in between then and now, that’s where things get very interesting IMO.

ok, so with this in mind I can answer your question regarding my role as a software developer, I’ll have to tell a fable. It’s going to be long and poorly written and will repeat some of the above in crude language, I’m tired…

So, it’s 1970, you’re a performance artist, you’ve been doing performances all over the place, in studios, outdoors, in concert halls, the back of police vans… you’ve got little to no documentation… probably some photos, maybe some writing, maybe you’re lucky enough to have some super 8 footage and some halfway decent audio recordings. Consumer video comes along, The Porta Pack, wow, this is great! cheap tape, sync audio, live previewing. But shit, the thing is prone to unspooling when jostled, and to see what things look at you need a hefty monitor. Fuck, maybe it’s not so great… but wait, you’ve got a studio, you could setup there and do all kinds of performances, watch them, adjust, finally get an idea of what/who you’re working with. Ok, this is strange, if I turn the monitor toward me I can watch myself as if I were the audience. Hmmm… there’s something different about this. I can’t go on doing the same kinds of performances. Nope. this is brand new. Yay! Video Art is born!!

Ok, so fast forward a decade. It’s 1980something, you’re an upcoming electronic artist using computers to make amazing things happen in REALTIME! You have one problem, how do you document and show people what you’re working on. Oh, of course!!! you record it on a Handycam! You pass the tapes around, copy them, they get copied, you end up representing your country at the Venice Biennial. Happy endings are great! Strange thing is you don’t ever notice any of the things your friends noticed in the 70s, nope, you go right on making documentation on video without thinking twice about yourself as a performer. “I’m not a performer, I’m a programmer, my MACHINE is the artist, HE’s performing, ask HIM what HE thinks! this shows you what he does, that’s all” … Ok… I’ll do that, but don’t you think your macho friend is making you look a little meek on tape? “nope, that’s the way I like it, I’ve put all of me into that thing, don’t pay attention to me”. Ok, I’m going to just say it dude, your machine’s got a bigger dick than you and you’re a bit of a chauvinist for masculinizing it the way you are. I think you’re using your machine in all kinds of weird ways and I think you should think about what it means to give yourself over to an object like that. I mean, seriously dude.

Ok, let’s fast forward 2 more decades. This thing called the internet is popular, everyone has a computer, realtime video processing is on every cpu, we video conference with friends and family, augmented reality is a burgeoning field. Ya, we can do anything with our data selves, artists and non artists alike. Yes! I’m going to share this video of me rotating photos and tossing them around using just my flailing arms to everyone in the entire world!! I look like an idiot? why do you keep looking at me??! Are you gay? yah. that’s it, I’m gay. Fuck dude, would you realize what the fuck it means to warp your face with that ichat filter? PLEASE!

end of story, guy is increasingly clueless, distractions are increasingly numerous.

so, I’ve used some colloquial language here to try and get a point across in impossibly high contrast. I play the role of the software developer in performances because I insist on forcing the acknowledgment that the computer is a site for performance and reflectivity. I am trying to use a laptop in 1975. I’m trying to understand what that means I guess.

I hope this response doesn’t offend anyone. I was just trying to have some fun with it,

see you all on friday?

Marc Garrett:

Hi Jeremy,

Before we wind this interview down – could you explain to those who were not present at the HTTP Gallery for your performance, what you did and how you feel it went, along with any other observations that you feel worth mentioning?

Jeremy Bailey:

Hi Marc,

Friday’s performance went really really well, great turn out and amazing audience, who of course were integral to the performance…

for those who are just checking in, I wrote a new piece of software called WarMail that lets groups of people work together on an email using an asteroids like interface. The premise being that in the future we will colonize space but will be spread so thin that everyone will have to have a certain military readiness to defend our intergalactic borders. We’ll also want to keep in touch with loved ones, WarMail, represents a multitasking approach to this problem. It provides both military training and communication with loved ones. As an added bonus it requires you to do so in public with a group of strangers (collaborative team building!). On friday we composed an email to my mother using glowsticks and our voices to navigate a ship and attack clusters of letters that represented an alien army. The movement of our glowsticks rotated the ship, and our voices(in song) created thrust.

Together we fired at letters to compose a message which, after much effort, read, “goddd”. I originally wanted something longer but the group was a bit disorganized and had trouble working together. We started things off by accidentally hitting the letter ‘g’, this is why we chose to start with god. It then took so long to get ‘o’ that I decided one word would be sufficient. Hitting the final letter ‘d’ resulted in much excitement and cheering which caused an accidental misfire and then laughter that triggered a second misfire, and thus the misspelling. I spoke to my mother today and she had received the email but was slightly confused and worried that I she had upset me somehow.

The most interesting part of Friday’s performance were the moments when individuals decided to act independently of the group. For instance at one point a lone clapper attempted to fire at the final ‘d’ as it was drifting past our sights. I was also surprised by the willingness of the audience to sing, in fact it seemed they enjoyed it a little too much, often over thrusting the ship past our target. They also sometimes sang overtop of my voice, missing crucial instructions.

Overall it was really exciting for me to mesh my performance with a live audience and I learned a lot about how groups of drunken strangers interact with each other, for those interested, documentation of the performance (the actual screen capture video of the audience in the interface) can be seen at the gallery now. It’s also secretly posted online, but I think I’ll wait for the exhibition to expire before I publish the link.

thanks to all those that came out on friday, especially to all the HTTP staff, I really enjoyed my time in London and met so many nice people I might have to consider returning sometime very soon,

Marc Garrett:

Hi Jeremy & all Netbehaviourists,

A warm thank you to Jeremy, for finding the time to take part in the interview on the Netbehaviour list.

Interview ends…

Other Information

HTTP Gallery – The Jeremy Bailey Show

Images from the Opening Night: Performance & Exhibition

Warmail performed at HTTP: Youtube Part1 and Part2

Jeremy Bailey on Youtube

Netbehaviour.org email list

jeremybailey.net

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 Computer and Fischer Price Loom to be defining objects of her childhood. She creates tactile representations of cyclical data structures in candy and knitting and is currently researching the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body.

Egenhoefer received her BFA from the Fiber department with a concentration in Digital Video from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Rachel Beth was an MFA fellow at the University of California, San Diego where she also was a graduate researcher at UCSD’s Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA).

The self-proclaimed digital arts nerd formerly worked on the editorial staff of Artbyte Magazine in New York City, and continues freelance writing on art, modern society, and media culture. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Los Angeles, New York, the Netherlands, the Options 2002 Biennial in Washington DC, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London, the 2003 Boston Cyber Arts Festival, the Banff Centre for the Arts, ISEA 2004 in Tallinn Estonia, the Curtain University of Technology in Perth Australia, and others.

Currently Rachel Beth is focusing on new projects. She was an artist in residence at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China (November & December 2007) and worked as an Artist in Residence in the UK at the University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton and Furtherfield in London (January-May 2008).

Jess: What are the main differences (pros and/or cons) of creating a work that is to be experienced digitally, and that which is contained within physical material borders (sweets, fabric etc…)? – this is very much a question to you as a *creator*

Rachel Beth: In some ways I feel like this is a hard question for me to answer because my work is very much about bridging these two experiences and pointing out that they aren’t that different.

There’s lots of clich’e answers like the digital being accessible anywhere on the web and that the material has the traditional sense of making and ‘aura’, but my work really sits between them and is about bringing the two together. Making the digital tactile, and the tangible coded.

Jess: What aspects of the digital would you like to be able to bring into your future work?

Rachel Beth: My most recent work, and the work I did during my residency in the UK uses motion and acceleration tracking. I’d like to continue using ideas around mapping motion and interaction. I’m not so interested in data visualization but rather how mapping actions and systems can make for new interactions or parallels. I’ve also begun to work with hacking the Nintendo Wii that has just kind of opened a whole slew of ideas. So I can see myself working more with that.

Jess: Can you tell us a bit more about how you are hacking the Wii and what drew you to the Wii as part of your artistic practice?

Rachel Beth: I’m not exactly hacking the Wii as much as I am using it as another input device or a tool. The Wii and Wii Motes come equipped with blue tooth so they are fairly easy to interface with other things that use blue tooth. I’d been thinking a lot about motion, and the motion of interaction both with knitting and with computing, as well as thinking about doing some motion tracking things in my work and around the same time the Wii came out. It uses motion, speed, angles, balance as a means of input. Some of my other work uses play and games so it just seemed natural for me to want to use it. I think it also ties in with pop culture and interacting with technology. It’s been fun!

Jess: How would you define a literate reader/experiencer of your work? (I’m thinking especially of the lovely melting sweets…how do you want your IDEAL audience to participate?)

Rachel Beth: I don’t really have an ideal audience. I strive to have multiple entry points in my work. I’ve had computer scientists view my work who know much more about code than I do but never knew that a knitting pattern looks exactly the same, or ludites who hate technology but suddenly realize there are simple, beautiful concepts in computing. Some people see my work and don’t realize it’s even a piece, some people spend hours coming back and looking at it. I’m okay with either of these extremes. It’s my hope that people find something to grab on to or relate to. Leaving a door partly open allows other people to add their own perspective as well. It’s always rewarding (well most of the time rewarding) when people discover things in your work you didn?t see before.

Jess: When is a creative piece imbued with *artistic* quality? What gives it that extra oomph? – for you as creator AND experiencer?

Rachel Beth: I don’t think it’s something you can quantify really, and perhaps it’s different for every piece. It’s a delicate balance of concept and material, clarity without being literal, and being playfully smart.

Jess: What is the role of *code* or coding (literally or metaphorically) in the creation of your work?

Rachel Beth: I often say that my work is about the relationships between textiles and technology on a historical, conceptual, physical and constructional level. On the constructional level I am interested in the similarity between knits and purl stitches, and binary zeros and ones. Knitting (and similar codes in weaving) are of course very tactile, and coding is intangible. Code also comes into my work in less literal ways. I’m interested in how people like Agnes Martin or Foucault use order in their work. I think ordering things is a lot like coding. It’s sets of instructions, or patterns for play. I often leave room for chance as well. The option that I might drop a stitch, or the program will crash.

Jess: Thinking about your work as containing, at least on some level, a set of instructions or guide for viewers/readers/interactors implies that authorial control remains with the creator. As Foucault would have it, authorial intention can be a way to limit interpretations. Also, since you mention patterns for play, I’m remembering Caillois and his framework which posits play on two axes: total creativity and more extreme ruled complexity. Where on the graph do you envision your work sitting most comfortably and does this change depending on where you are exhibiting and the kind of work itself?

Rachel Beth: I’m not entirely sure what the diagram is supposed to imply. More rules = more creativity? Or less rules = more creativity? In either case, I’m not sure I could plot my work on this chart. I have been interested in how Foucault describes order and creating order. I can see how creating too many rules would limit the interpretation. I guess this is another one of those delicate balances artists strive for – creating order, or rules, or structures that set up a context from which the viewer can engage with the work bringing their own influences and also able to depart to other connections. In some ways, when I’m making my work I’m thinking about both the order I’m creating but also conceptually talking about how others might view order, using algorithms and sets of instructions as concept. With the exception maybe of my Wii Knitting (which has explicit instructions because it’s a game) I generally use sets of instructions as concept related to computing as apposed to instructions for how people are supposed to view my work.

Jess: Have you noticed any general differences in the way your work is approached?

Rachel Beth: I often think that my work sits in this space between. Given that I work both with textiles and technology I can show work in a textile/ fiber/ sculptural context and then show the same work or give the same presentation in a digital media/ technology context and it?s approached differently just because of the different context. Context always changes how things are approached, and also which pieces I choose to show in combination with others.

Jess: How does your own perception of your work change as you create it and then when it is *complete* (if it ever really is finished). Do you have a favourite piece?

Rachel Beth: As I work on anything I’m always thinking about how my work will be perceived? asking myself questions and making changes as part of my process. Specifically I think it’s different for every piece. Some projects I’ve researched, thought out, sketched, and had every explanation for things before I ever started, and then when I made it, I hated it. But that work usually evolves into something much more organic. This is how ‘Lollipop Grid’ came about. I like to watch people view/ interact with my work. I’m not sure my perception changes per say, but I get new insight into my work? I did a show at Lighthouse in Brighton that was all work in progress. It was the first time I ever did that and I was a bit nervous about it. But it ended up being a great way to get things out of the studio and look at them in new light, then go back and keep working.

Jess: What would your perfect studio/workspace be like?

Rachel Beth: Ha, that’s good. I’m always thinking about dream houses and dream studios. I like spaces that are repurposed, old factories, warehouses, unique spaces with odd shapes. Big windows. Definitely a whole wall for all my books. Another wall to stick stuff up on, I’m always tacking up bits of paper, samples, notes, sketches, pictures, etc. Lots of floor space and tables that can be moved around and reconfigured for different projects. I guess that’s kinda what my studio is like right now only it’s a bit smaller than the dream version!

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer
http://www.rachelbeth.net

Info regarding Rachel Beth Egenhoefer’s residency at
University of Brighton, Lighthouse and Furtherfield,
in the UK January ? April 2008.
http://www.scansite.org/scan.php?pid=415
Made possible by Distributed South
http://www.distributedsouth.org.uk

“Free software needs free reference manuals”, insists Free Software guru Richard Stallman[1]. The FLOSS Manuals project has risen to this challenge and produced a library of manuals for Free Software in a Free-Software-style collaborative manner.

The term “FLOSS” bundles the synonyms “libre” and “open source” with “free”. Free Software is software that you are free to use for whatever purpose you like; it is a matter of freedom, not price. Like freedom of speech or freedom of the press, the freedom to use software is important for a free society.

We can only exercise our freedom to use a piece of software if we understand how to use it. Even the best-designed software can be complex to operate and have a learning curve. If the instruction manuals that help people learn how to use that software are proprietary (not freely modifiable) and are expensive or inaccurate as a result, they can slow or even prevent people from understanding how to use it.

FLOSS Manuals provides manuals for a variety of Free Software. Graphics, video, audio, office, Internet, even GNU/Linux itself. An entire section is devoted to manuals for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) system. There is a selection of manuals for websites, including Wikimedia Commons, Archive.org and the FLOSS Manuals site itself. You can read these online or download PDF versions to read or print offline. Some manuals are available in different languages: English, Dutch and Farsi.

The project’s focus on the OLPC’s software is worthy of comment as one of the criticisms of the OLPC software from some adult commentators has been that the user interface and applications are so different from other systems that they are difficult to understand and use. Whether this is a fair criticism or not, they and everyone else now have a well-designed set of manuals to consult.

The website is a good example of a clean, warm 1950s television-age magazine-inspired web design and well laid out but friendly and informal. It could hardly be more user-friendly if the words “Don’t Panic” were printed in large letters. The manuals themselves are a good example of clean “default style” typography. The sections and subsections are separated and titled in a clear and unobtrusive style that provides context and guides the reader without drawing attention to itself.

The one curious feature of the manuals isn’t in their design or writing but in their licensing. They are licenced under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). This is the licence that GNU, Linux and many other Free Software projects are licenced under, but it is designed for software rather than for text. The GNU project has produced a documentation licence, the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL), which is used by Wikipedia, among other projects.

The FDL is a controversial licence. It allows un-modifiable and non-removable advertising statements and political statements to be added to the instruction text of manuals. In practice, there has been little or no abuse of these features. But it can be a bone of contention for projects. The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence would be a better choice, and Wikipedia may switch to it in the future, but it is still controversial with licence obsessives like the Debian Linux Legal discussion list.

FLOSS Manuals avoid these problems by using the GPL. Since the manuals are written using a Wiki, which makes getting the “source code” for them as easy as selecting a tab on the web page for each book, the fact that the GPL is designed to work with programs with source code isn’t a problem. It’s an unusual decision that is worth understanding the context of, though.

As well as versions that you can read online or download and print, FLOSS Manuals are publishing print versions of some of their manuals, including the Audacity and OLPC manuals. Print may seem environmentally unfriendly, slow and low-tech compared to online manuals. But physical books are useful if your software is in full-screen mode if you want to learn how to use your software during your commute on the way to use it, or if, like most people, you have better retention for the written word than for pixels on a screen.

Having a book to refer to alongside an OLPC laptop folded open at the right page or when the laptop is turned off is much more convenient than referring to the documentation on-screen or discovering how the system works through trial and error. The OLPC manuals are visually very appealing, maintaining the clean and child-friendly colourful symbolism of the OLPC website and user interface.

Producing books reflects FLOSS Manuals’ organization and maturity as a project, as does the diversity of the software being covered and the solid design of both the site and the manuals. Whether you are looking for a good resource to direct newbies to, looking to learn new software yourself (I’ll be trying to learn Blender again and downloading Alchemy based on their manuals here), or needing to demonstrate the existence of serious training materials when recommending Free Software for work or projects, FLOSS Manuals is an excellent resource for learning how to use free software.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libc/Free-Manuals.html

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

FILE Sao Paulo, Electronic Language International Festival, which took place in Brazil this August is subtitled Two Thousand and Eight Million Pixels. A heading that references the vast resolutions made possible by the 4K digital projection systems that were used to show cinematic work at the festival this year, and forming one of the main themes of the show. Other categories set up in an impressively produced catalogue that accompanied the show included; installations, game art, media art and performance. Works under these categories were exhibited alongside games, and the projects of commercial exhibitors to produce an energetic, rag-tag collection; that was constantly bursting out of the curatorial confines that these groupings defined.

In it’s ninth year, and continuing to expand into other cities around Brazil, FILE offers a particularly south American perspective on the global phenomena that is media art, bringing together artists from Brazil and Argentina, as well as from Japan, North America and Europe. The opportunities for debate and discussion with people of similar interests as well as the camaraderie of working together to put on a show are what made the event particularly memorable for me on a personal level, and also (I hope) helped develop my understanding of Brazilian culture.

In a country that has both 120 and 220 volt electrical circuits, and a working culture (at least in the gallery where we were exhibiting) that has a surfeit of people; each with clearly defined job roles, the ability to work collaboratively is a necessity. Working together with large groups of electricians, carpenters, AV technicians, carpet fitters, painters and decorators, and cleaners; as well as directors, architects, curators, administrators, overseers, and volunteers meant that someone, somewhere in the building would be able to help with your particular problem. While the ability to take on board the opinion of each-and-every person involved, about the merits of, for instance, a particular technique for the securing of a projector, before reaching an agreed solution, is the job of a seasoned negotiator.

The installation process of my own work Aquaplayne, required the complete construction of an installation from scratch, caused by the rather Byzantine customs situation that exists in Brazil. Shipping work extant would have meant it sitting in customs for months, multiple form filling and huge cost to the festival. As this was not then an option, I would have to recreate my work by ordering materials for purchase in Brazil as much as possible, while surreptitiously bringing the more difficult to locally source tech through customs myself. As I later discovered I was not the only artist who had to ‘smuggle’ equipment through customs.

Giles Askham, installation, electronic language. 2008.

Just as my plane was about to land, I was presented with a customs declaration form that asked if I was bringing anything into the country that cost more than $500 US. My laptop is battered to bits, and while it did originally cost more than this, I did not particularly wish to pay the Brazilian government an additional fee for the privilege, and so ticked a different box. With sweaty palms and shifty eyes, I managed to clear airport customs without any further questions. I was later amazed to hear from other artists, that they had had similar experiences, only with highly sophisticated hardware worth many times the cost of my laptop; this did at least help to put my own unease into proper perspective, but I can only imagine how they felt in the arrivals hall.

The installation process took a long time, other artists whose work was supposed to be plug-and-play took three days to get up and running, mine took a week. It often seemed, as Sheldon Brown once commented, that in the southern hemisphere, us northerners would have to ‘spin our electrons in the opposite direction’. This process was not without its advantages however, it did mean there was time to iron out physical and coding glitches and really concentrate on the presentation of the work. It also enabled me to get to know the other people working on the show, many of whom were very generous with their time in assisting in the installation of my work.

As is often the case with these types of shows, there came a moment on the day before the launch when everything seemed to fall into place. Where before there had been bare wires, trailing cables and piles of detritus, now there stood sparkling white, newly painted plinths, and gleaming bright, perfectly calibrated, projections. At the end of the day an army of red-shirted invigilators descended on the show and learnt the ropes by playing with the works.

The launch event itself was packed. While the show was open to the public, numbers were strictly limited, but this was not the case on the opening night. I have never seen so many people in a gallery and actually found it quite intimidating. What it did provide though was a good technical workout for all the exhibited pieces, all of which successfully passed this examination without a hitch.

There were many works of note exhibited, some of my own particular favourites included; Memories by Anaisa Franco, Full Body Games by Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn, LevelHead by Julian Oliver, The Scalable City by Sheldon Brown and L.A.S.E.R Tag by Graffiti Research Lab.

Anaisa Franco, a Brazilian artist who recently graduated from IDAT Plymouth, exhibited Memories, a sculptural work consisting of two humanoid robotic heads, hung from the ceiling at head height, facing one another. Cast in clear plastic, so that we can see their inner digital workings, and with tiny LCD monitors mounted into the back of their skulls, in order that we might view the animated dreams that they exchanged with each other.

Anaisa Franco, sculptural work, humanoid robotic head, digital.

Full Body Games by Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn requires that we jump in and physically control the game. Through shadow-mapping our image is transposed into a projection, from where we either jump over or duck under simple graphical objects that move across the screen. Selecting one of the three other options enables us to use our silhouette to touch game objects, making full use of our bodily gestures and motions in the works game-play.

Full Body Games by Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn.

LevelHead by Julian Oliver offers an intriguing interface, consisting of a simple set of cubes placed on a plinth in front of a projection. The resulting effect of our engagement with these cubes is remarkable. Upon walking into the room, we are presented with our own mirror image and that of the plinth projected onto the far wall. Where we might however expect to see images of the cubes, we glimpse a digital world. Taking the place of the cubes in the projection is a set of three dimensional rooms, doors and stairways, populated by a single, shadowy figure. The object of the exercise quickly becomes apparent. By picking up the cubes and gently tilting them backwards, forwards and side-to-side we are able to direct our figure through the maze that is its little world, between rooms and from one cube to another in order to find the exit. A simple idea executed with sophistication, pattern recognition software is used to detect the position of the cubes within three-dimensional space, it then relays this information back to the program which then directs the character in its Kafkaesque wonderings.

LevelHead by Julian Oliver.

The Scalable City by Sheldon Brown equally pushes our perceptions of what technology is capable of, while also making use of a cube in its interface, by creating with the aid of satellite mapping, distopian versions of six different cities around the world, each situated on one face of the cube. A trackball enables our navigation between the cities, but our use of this also creates the infrastructure of each plane. Our movement through the space lays down roads as we cut through the virgin landscape, in a tornado of suburban housing, quickly creating each city in a photorealist sprawl of nondescript neighbourhoods. Using state-of-the-art hardware and software systems, we are reminded of what we are capable of doing to our planet using this technology, as we gleefully create our very own Borg cube.

The Scalable City by Sheldon Brown.

Sheldon Brown is also very involved with the 4K cinema project that FILE is highlighting this year, and presents a narrative version of The Scalable City, one of 14 newly commissioned films, that makes use of the technology at the festival. With an extended essay by Lev Manovich in the exhibition catalogue on the subject, in which he likens the onset of the technology that has 8 million pixels of resolution, to that of Seventeenth Century Dutch painting, in terms of its clarity of representation. The experience of watching the films from the audience is certainly eye-popping. Starting the sequence of films with an homage to the Lumiere brothers, we are confronted with what appears at first to be a high-resolution stills photograph of a desert landscape. Everything is still, there is not a cloud in the sky, and then in the distance we see smoke, is this digitally generated? No, the work is actually a live action video, and it is the steam from a train, one which is bearing down on us, in crystal clarity, all of the highlight and shadow detail in the image perfectly resolved in each and every frame, then the train passes and the screen returns to its stillness and calm. What follows are a series of films, ranging from computer animations of milky-way fly-throughs, mathematical modelling routines, and ray-traces of molecular growth, to narrative and national geographic style work, all of which perfectly reveals the technical brilliance of the imaging system being used. An additional, unintentional effect of this hyper-real presentation is that it makes us ultra-sensitive to the occasional frame that gets dropped from the film sequence. As well as the single pixel line that dissects the centre of the screen in this particular setting. The clarity of detail provided by such systems of representation, conversely makes us even more aware that what they offer us are still mere shadows on the wall.

L.A.S.E.R Tag by Graffiti Research Lab an ‘open-source weapon of mass defacement’. in contrast, uses a 5000K projector, (in old money, the K here refers to the number of lumens of power the projector uses, rather than the number of lines of pixels projected, which in this case is likely to be a more traditional 1024 or so). The purpose being to open up the cities buildings to the work of it’s graffiti artists. By using a green laser pen to draw and write onto the sides of offices, the pilings of bridges, and the plinths of Sao Paulo’s monuments. The L.A.S.E.R Tag re-projects these lines in a single red, green, or blue channel, with the addition of the line weight and drip patterns that would accompany them if they were applied with a spray-can; and in so doing opening up inaccessible private space to public comment.

L.A.S.E.R Tag by Graffiti Research Lab.

The works exhibited at FILE could be categorised in terms of their models of production. Much of the work exhibited was created within the emerging European lab system, concentrating on collaboration and the use of open source software, with work from Spain in particular being well represented. In contrast to this is the highly funded US university system, which in terms of the works exhibited here was making full use of cutting-edge hardware systems in their productions. While the 4K cinema screenings takes pride of place in the catalogue, it can be described as leading edge technology, and will certainly receive widespread coverage over the coming years, other interesting patterns of production emerge. There were also contributions from commercial Brazilian producers of interactive experiences, work created using open source software. The programming languages these companies used were not chosen for political or critical reasons, but simply in order to keep down the cost of production. Perhaps FILE provides with its mixture of forms and tropes, unlikely combinations of artistic and commercial projects – a more valid appraisal of a global scene than we might first imagine.

FILE SAO PAULO 2008
http://www.file.org.br/

Memories- Anaisa Franco
http://anaisafranco.blogspot.com/2007/12/building-connected-memories-heads.html

Full Body Games – Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn
http://www.feedtank.com/fbg.html

Levelhead – Julian Oliver
http://julianoliver.com/levelhead

The Scalable City – Sheldon Brown
http://crca.ucsd.edu/sheldon/scalable/

L.A.S.E.R Tag – Graffiti Research Lab
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=76

WORLDWIDEWEGG
2 August – 13 September 2008
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow

Eggs, toast and disco are everything you need to get the day started. From the daily activities of egg-laying in the Gorgie City Farm in Edinburgh to a mechanical toaster at the Centre of Contemporary Arts in Glasglow, the World Wide Wegg relays the biological production of the rural to the commonplace production of toast in the urban.

Through the vast communication portal known as the Internet, each egg layed in realtime at the farm triggers a toaster to produce a piece of toast for visitors at the gallery. An upbeat iTunes playlist controlled by the chickens is used to help jump start the day. With a cheeky pun referencing booty dancing Jason Forrest’s label, each peck from the chickens skips a song on a playlist from Cock Rock Disco. The sound produced is more unlistenable than dance-inducing as each song plays for no longer than a second before skipping to the next. The sound, however, is said to inspire the idea of the ‘perpetual fluttering of chickens’.

To complete the production, a lottery ticket can be purchased online resembling that of a old slot machine. With the use of simple computation, 6 random numbers are generated by the egg-laying activities of the chickens. Adding even more to the slight randomness of eggs, toast, chickens and Cock Rock Disco, the lottery completes the whole production by including a token for revenue. The lottery is a game that further engages the chickens who have no awareness of the tracking and unusual production of their actions. With a brightly coloured pixel website, and low-res web cam captures of the chickens in action, the World Wide Wegg is well packaged complete with low-fi aesthetics, pop cultural references and play-on-words.

The World Wide Wegg is a project that admires values of simplicity. Not only in with the use of simple one-way action-response communication, but also in the admiration of simple daily modern actions or processes (i.e. producing a toast or skipping a song on iTunes), as well as, the basic habitual activities of the networked chickens (i.e. egg-laying and pecking). Together these urban and rural actions and productions are linked together as symbols of the archetypal breakfast for the playful application of modern technology.

The World Wide Wegg is a quirky project that utilizes the frenetic activities chickens to create a rather unusual breakfast experience. It is a simple gesture that enlivens interactions between a world of chickens and the stark white walls of a contemporary art space.

The World Wide Wegg is brought to you by creator of audio/visual collective NewFutureNow and blog and online entertainment space, Gabba.tv.

The World Wide Wegg is presented as part of ALT-W an exhibition exploring New Directions in Scottish Digital Culture by artists supported by the Alt-W Fund on until 13 September.

Mobilefest has always had this wide-angle view for mobile and wireless technologies, but to our surprise, examples where the cellphone or a hand-held device is not obvious caught the attention and the affection of the visitors.

With a trans-disciplinary approach, we have been asking this question –
How can mobile technology contribute to democracy, culture, art, ecology, peace, education, health and the third sector? Two projects have pricked visitor interest with varied questions: Ovu and The Aphrodite Project.

Ovu
A wearable device created by Kate Bauer allows women to track their fertility easily and stylishly. Raising questions about the usability of current basal temperature thermometers that create a not-so-stimulating mood for couples, Ovu is made up of a lace armband, with a highly sensitive thermistor attached on the inside that picks up changes in the Basal Body Temperature (BBT) of a woman.

“In researching methods of tracking fertility, I came across many different products. However, many of them shared similar flaws. The basal thermometer is complicated to use. It involves a lot of tracking and documentation and begins to resemble a science experiment at some point with all the charting involved. And after all of this planning and tracking, who is in the mood to make babies anyway?

Then there is the software available, either on the web or through downloading software for the computer. These graphs are even scarier-looking than those with the basal thermometer. What’s worse is that these charts are based on a number you type in, which is not always 100% accurate in predicting the correct cycle.

Composed of an Arduino Mini, a thermistor and a Bluetooth antenna. It connects a Java application on a cellphone that sends the data when a connection is available to a MySql web server where all the history is stored and accessible. Then, if she is ovulating a web application, she can text her and her partner’s mobile phone.

The Aphrodite Project

Platforms are shoes equipped with an audio alarm, LCD screen and GPS devices attached to them in the latest models that provide a complete, up-to-date set for prostitutes.

Created by a team led by Norene Leddy, the beauty of this project is its social goals and objectives. In her own words, “Platforms is designed to question moral attitudes and value judgments, especially with this marginalized section of the population: Who gets new technology and when? What is the true value of sexual services? Using an archetypal model, is it possible to reclaim the profession for modern women? What are the ethics of surveillance and tracking? Is it possible to ensure that this information will empower and not endanger sex workers? Is it ever possible to guarantee that knowledge will stay within the hands of those who it is intended for? The shoes address creativity and art-making as well as practical issues of design and marketability. It is my hope that in addition to creating beautifully crafted objects, the project will contribute to the current international debate over the regulation, decriminalization, and legalization of prostitution.”

The possibility of having all those techno-devices embedded in a shoe got so much attention from the Brazilian audience, first because of its attention towards it being seen as pretty trendy, then knowing more about the complete scope and complexity of the project, with the audience asking questions of why and how it was developed. Of course, there was an immediate intrigue with the project’s down-to-earth and urban collaboration with sex workers. Discussions varied from talking about the incredible bridge that this project provides to more gritty subjects about sex workers, prostitution, surveillance and security.

The discussion was on the table at the end of the day, whether with a yellow, wit or shy smile! The level of attention was so high that the Aphrodite Project was featured on national television at “Programa Hebe Camargo”, a Brazilian Oprah who’s been on television since the early 50s when Brazilian television started.

Both projects show that their trans-disciplinary approaches to mobile technologies will be more available. Proposing a contemporary approach in encouraging, innovative ways to explore new ideas and discussions.

Related links:

Aphrodite Project
http://nobetty.net

ISEA2008 quick facts: held in Singapore, 25 July – 3 August 2008. ISEA has been running for two decades. It began in 1988 as the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts. It is now the International Symposium on Electronic Art. It has been a biennial event, but from next year becomes annual. A new ISEA Foundation has been developed. The coordinating role passes from Nina Czegledy to Julianne Pierce. The 2009 event will be held in Dublin (first call for papers coming this September). ISEA2010 is likely to be in Germany (Ruhr region).

In his weirdly scheduled ISEA2008 lecture – delivered the day after the closing night party – Lev Manovich argued that we have shifted from a state of new media to one of ‘more’ media. There is simply so much media these days (the product of new technologies and social interactive forms) that it is humanly impossible to gain an overall perspective. Our only viable option is to draw upon the quantitative methods that have driven contemporary science and business. We must data-mine culture in order to develop new methods of visualisation that have the potential to represent cultural patterns indiscernible to the naked critical eye and provide a necessary interface to the universe of specific cultural objects. Manovich dubs this new critical and expressive field, ‘cultural analytics’. While I am suspicious that significant aspects of culture are so easily amenable to discrete quantitative representation, Manovich’s lecture, delivered to a packed audience, resonated very much with my experience of ISEA2008. With its 800 delegates, five concurrent streams, juried exhibition and huge range of associated panels, seminars, workshops and exhibitions, ISEA2008 was anything but digestible. As Andreas Broeckmann suggested at the ISEA board meeting, every participant is likely to have had a substantially different experience of the event depending upon their particular path through it. A stronger and more clearly integrated keynote program may have helped, but there are clear issues of scale that no manner of organization can solve. Lacking the means to effectively data-mine the event, all I can offer here is a sample of issues that emerged for me.

Rendering Vectors
I was initially a bit disappointed when I wandered down into the bowels of the National Museum of Singapore to see the juried exhibition. Very little stood out and many works seemed either poorly resolved or overblown. Alternative browsers have been a staple of net-art since the late 90s, so it felt odd to encounter a huge 3D triangle displaying images from yet another alternative browser (Metahaven’s Exodus). Similarly, Horia Cosmin Samoila and Marie Christine Driesen’s representation of alpha brain activity in terms of a swirling sphere of white points against a black background, Untitled, seemed little more than a dubious science show exhibit, indulging in standard tropes of mind as a flowing galaxy-style space (much better if they had reduced the visualization to a 32X32 grid of pixels). More conceptually interesting was Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan’s Gendered Strategies for Loitering which aimed to represent gender-based differences in urban spatial experience. Women, it seems, can move safely through public spaces in Mumbai and Singapore but they cannot loiter. Unfortunately the work itself did not really make this point sufficiently clear. It combined a multi-screen video projection with a computer game simulation when, more likely, a reduction of technological means was necessary. Linking these three works is a fundamental concern with developing new means of rendering elusive processes – whether related to data flows, physical processes or social interaction. They, and many other works in the juried show and associated exhibitions, aim less to depict stable things than to portray vectors, trajectories and movements. Despite their limitations (a bit lessened upon learning that the juried show was developed during a very short lead-up ISEA residency program), these works represent an interesting effort to render aspects of mobility (within larger spaces that are themselves conceived in mobile terms).

Positioning Play
Play is a central conceit within contemporary electronic art, but how is it articulated? How does it take shape? More particularly, how does it engage with popular forms of computer-mediated play and with what the French art theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud, has termed the ‘relational’ play of contemporary art? This is a question that Australian academic, Daniel Palmer, posed in his excellent paper, “The Critical Ambivalence of Play in Media Art”. Media/electronic art, Palmer suggests, is awkwardly positioned between popular entertainment (Wii consoles and the like) and the modeling of social relations in radical art; never quite satisfying either camp – never permitting play a simple (uncritical) precedence or, on the other hand, a properly dialogic aesthetic shape. One response to this dilemma is the pursuit of ever richer and more kinaesthetically engaging interfaces. Arguably, however, it is not by effacing the technological character of interaction – by returning it to some unconvincing phenomenological state – that the fundamental issues of play are delineated and addressed. Instead it is by exploring the irregular contours of interaction – its blind spots, interstices and spaces of contradiction – that other dimensions of play become evident. The play, for example, of Tad Ermitano’s Quartet (juried show) relates ostensibly to the sense of controlling a traditional gamelan orchestra via hand gestures. The actual play, however, relates to the strange, clumsy, obviously wired and mediated character of the interaction – the sense of indirection, of curious mechanical autonomy. Similarly, Priscilla Bracks, Gavin Sade and Matt Dwyer’s Charmed (associated exhibition, Experimenta Play++) is as much about the artificiality of computer mediated spatial interaction (and worlds) as it is an appealing navigable environment. The play lies in its subversion of ordinary interface expectations – its insistence, for instance, that physically shifting a viewing pod about on a table alters the view on the world (contrary to the typical expectation that a screen serves as a stable container for an internal universe). These works have a dimension of play that runs alongside and counter to their obvious playfulness. This dimension is less about manipulation and immediate feedback than about the playful disturbance of conventional interactive paradigms.

Managing ‘More’ Media
The German media arts historian, Oliver Grau, spoke about the need to develop a large archival project that would map and conserve the heritage of media arts practice. He argued that there have been a number of efforts to develop such a resource, but that they have all foundered under the weight of technological and financial demands. He provided an overview of a new on-line archive, The Database of Virtual Art, which has been developed at Danube University Krems and has an impressive advisory panel drawn from around the world. While developing effective and sustainable means for managing the heritage of media arts is clearly a worthwhile objective, I am uncomfortable with the thought of a centralised database project – particularly if alongside conservation the archive also aims to assume an editorial/curatorial role, tracing out main threads of development and a canon of key works. There is a risk, despite the advisory panel, that the archive will ignore, or treat as secondary, all manner of local contexts and practices that may or may not be in step with whatever dominant (probably North American and European) paradigm of development is identified. It may better to facilitate the creation of a range of local (distributed) archives. In my view, any universal system should have the more restricted role of enabling communication between the archival nodes, rather than serving as an uber-perspective on the field.

Despite my reservations, I found ISEA2008 an interesting and useful event, if only to confront all sorts of views and practices alien to my own and to have the opportunity to speak to a variety of artists and theorists directly. No possibility of adequately taking in the whole event, but is that really so essential? Is a map of everything better than a set of specific, limited encounters? Actually, if I wanted to say anything more, it would be to mention further specific details: Alex Monteith’s wonderfully playful (but non-interactive) video installation, Composition for Farmer, in the associated NZ exhibition, Cloudland; Paul Brown’s insightful effort to trace the roots of the split between contemporary art and media/electronic arts to a division between sensualism and intellectualism within modernism; and Daniel Peltz’s, Beepez-le, a small poetic piece reflecting upon mobile phone practices in Cameroon. Which leaves me with one last question, how am I going to get to Dublin?

As 080808, the second UpStage Festival of live online performances, draws closer, one of the 14 selected performances has already begun: “Calling Home: Part 1” by activelayers was presented on Tuesday 1 July.

The show revolves around four elusive characters, who are perhaps lost or searching or need to be called home, and who may or may not be connected to each other. Rather than providing a linear narrative, “Calling Home: Part 1” introduced these characters and threw down some of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of their lives, for the audience to ponder. Beyond the performance, further clues are provided on the activelayers web site (part two of the whole), where each character has a profile and links to their blogs and email addresses. The characters also appear in other online environments and email lists as they wander cyberspace, looking for a way home. We are invited to engage with the characters via all these means, to discover more about their personal pilgrimages.

activelayers are Cherry Truluck (UK), Suzon Fuks (Belgium/Australia), James Cunningham (Australia) and Liz Bryce (Aotearoa/NZ); the group collaborated on “The Old Hotel” which was performed at the 070707 UpStage Festival and formed activelayers early in 2008 to continue their collaborative work. As some of the more experienced users of the cyberformance platform UpStage, their performances have pushed the software to new limits. In “The Old Hotel” they found ways to add audio to UpStage before that was available as a feature, and in “Calling Home” they are experimenting with the use of multiple stages – active layers in action!

An UpStage “stage” is a web page which delivers visual, audio and textual material to an online audience in real time. Using more than one stage simultaneously creates a sense of multiple co-existing worlds that can criss-cross and overlap – avatars travel between stages, news items are echoed and transformed, and the sound from all stages is heard at once. It’s definitely a new challenge for the cyberformance audience: it took me some minutes to get over my anxiety of missing out on something – I was switching rapidly from one window to the other until finally I understood that there was no fast-paced narrative to try to keep up with, rather the gradual unfolding of character and situation. It’s always possible to scroll back in the text chat to catch up on anything missed, but in fact I didn’t have to do this. Once I found the rhythm of the piece, I moved more slowly between the stages and lingered where my interest took me.

Grand Uncle’s Hendrix-obsessed radio show and dreadful smoker’s cough provided a background score for the show, while specific sounds were used to call us back to particular stages, such as the mobile phone ringing on Finch’s stage, and dogs barking on Esme’s stage. Heather’s stage is quiet but magical – a talking diary and an old outside dunny that turns Tardis-like to provide Heather with a secret route to Esme’s stage. Postcards, emails, radio, television, mobile phones, blogs – for all the communication networks these characters have access to, they are isolated in their own little bubbles until Heather appears in Esme’s stage. Grand Uncle never makes a visual appearance but his gravely voice – disembodied yet clearly attached to a complaining body – drives the performance along and holds it all together.

The same networks of communication are also available to the audience: you can call Finch’s mobile phone (a UK number), send Grand Uncle a story and even be interviewed by him, and leave posts on Heather and Esme’s blogs (see http://www.activelayers.net/ for links). This performance continues beyond the confines of the stages and the time of the performance, and the audience is encouraged to engage with the characters. activelayers want to provoke the audience out of their passivity – whether we are stage-hopping, interacting with the characters, or simply pondering over what it might all mean, this is definitely a show to get you out of that comfortable seat in the dark auditorium.

Part 3 will be performed at the 080808 UpStage Festival, taking place online in UpStage on 8-9 August 2008, one of 14 performances created and performed by artists in 14 different time zones. See www.upstage.org.nz for further information about 080808 and the schedule of performances and watch online from anywhere, no log-in required.

Feurbach’s “The Essence of Christianity” (1843) discusses the importance we make of images and illusions, and that we prefer “the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being”. Second Life, the 3-D online ecosystem that is created and maintained by those who virtually inhabit it, is arguably a testament to our culture’s embrace of this level of fantasy and denial of the Real, which Ludwig Feuerbach had presciently observed shortly after the invention of the camera.

However, bringing to light this realization isn’t to suggest that Second Life doesn’t have its appeal to those of us who don’t barter, exchange, purchase, and develop friendships within its virtual walls. Life on the outside might still be a preferred existence to most. Still, it can be alluring for all to discover the blurred boundaries between virtual and real, avatar and human, representation and being, illuminating possibilities within a world that very closely parallels ours. Joseph DeLappe’s recent project, aptly a social experiment encased in a shell of net art, creates a space of in-betweenness that invites us to experience elements of both worlds without committing either.

Realized in several stages, DeLappe’s virtual re-creation of The Salt Satyagraha, Mahatma Ghandi’s Salt March to Dandi, a journey 240 miles long, is part installation and part performance art. His historical re-enactment reveals more about how virtual space is navigated from real space than it explains the politics of Mahatma Ghandi’s protest against the British salt tax in 1930, utilizing travel in real space, a blog, and images from the journey housed on Flickr.

DeLappe’s re-creation relies on Second Life to provide a virtual landscape of India and an avatar that sports the likeness of Ghandi. DeLappe’s role in this excursion is to propel the avatar through this space utilizing his physical movement in reality, creating a visceral connection to the march and providing a personality to an otherwise soulless avatar. As part of DeLappe’s mission, he welcomed strange participants along his path to join him in his peace march by offering a walking staff. These participants met him on Second Life while real-life participants also served as spectators of his journey at Eyebeam’s Chelsea gallery.

A custom-designed treadmill in Real Life provides movement through Second Life. DeLappe, the avatar’s human counterpart, takes the journey seriously, wearing comfortable shoes, a T-shirt, and gym pants for the stretch of the march, which he achieves over 26 days. The treadmill has a wooden desk for his laptop, a bottle of water, and a coffee mug; a leather cushion at abdomen height provides ample comfort for his journey through cyberspace. His activity through cyberspace is projected onto a wall.

The relationship between two sometimes disparate and sometimes mirroring worlds is in constant negotiation. When Second Life crashes, DeLappe and his avatar are kicked out of the system. A simple reboot will bring them back, though the interruption results in a system error that forces his avatar to return to the location he had at the beginning of the day, purging the data it had collected since that point. DeLappe, by now familiar with this setback, wanders away from his treadmill station to grab a nutrition bar. After another day of cyber navigation, he calmly resumes his initial position and dives back in.

To think that there isn’t tension in virtual space is a misunderstanding of how closely we connect ourselves to our virtual counterparts in the social context of Second Life. It is a utopian space, on the one hand, as it enables users to, in some way, materialize personas that are otherwise only possible in one’s imagination. However, conflicts abound in relationship to those personas – reactions to where they lie politically, socially, and economically – and to the limited nature of communication through text. DeLappe’s Ghandi was no exception when he encountered Storm36Thor, a long-haired thug with a beefy build, a machine gun, and a T-shirt with the acronym FBI written across it. Their encounter was initiated by gunfire, as Storm36 Thor shot in the air to announce his authority.

Disinterested in and perhaps unaware of who Mahatma Gandhi was, Storm36 Thor was unimpressed by DeLappe’s introduction and by the idea of joining him on his journey. A self-described ‘trigger happy’ avatar, the human behind Storm36Thor could have been anyone from a reckless teenager to a bored executive. There is no way of knowing the age, gender, political leaning, or social or economic status of the person behind the avatar. Yet the encounter gave DeLappe and his audience a window into virtual violence (unnecessary gunfire), social interactivity (introducing oneself to another) and theatre (heightened persona).

The exploration of how these two environments engage with one another creates a third environment that is neither fully virtual nor fully real but instead rests between the two in a space informed by each of them. This third space relies on both for inspiration, historical context, and creativity. How we socially interact with each other in real life is the basis for how we socially interact in virtual space, but the two interactions greatly differ. While an avatar represents a human being, it is not wholly or truthfully reflective of the human who created it. And for those of us in DeLappe’s audience in physical space, our interaction with all is distanced and removed.

With respect to his interaction with Storm36Thor, DeLappe was comfortable with the level of tension they generated in cyberspace, perhaps more than he might be in real life, and playfully antagonized him by questioning his use of a machine gun in declared virtual a safe zone, the plaza of a mall. Their displayed interaction became an entertainment vehicle, bringing his physical spectators into the realm of his theatre. In this case, the virtual confrontation had no consequences as each eventually wandered away from the other in boredom.

The second stage of this Second Life project is a 17-foot cardboard papercraft sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi’s avatar currently on display at Eyebeam. This representation of a real person is the same size as Michelangelo’s David, produced using a 3-D rapid prototype printing technology from the 8-inch avatar.

The mixed layers of real and fantasy, history and re-enactment, and human and representation between every phase of DeLappe’s project become more difficult to distinguish, mirroring our postmodern sensibility and the mediated extensions that history and human life produce. One can only think of how we might further add to these dimensions of possibility, and create worlds of existence that don?t rely on the relationship between space and time.

Big Buck Bunny is the second short 3D computer animated cartoon from the Blender Foundation. The Blender Foundation produces these films to stimulate development of and promote use of their popular eponymous free software 3D modelling and rendering package.

The Foundation’s first film, codenamed Orange, was “Elephants Dream”. This was in the European experimental stop-frame animation tradition, a dark Gilliamesque fantasy with two men trying to escape a threatening clockwork labyrinth that may or may not really exist. The character and scenery designs were excellent, and the film as a whole was very atmospheric. The quality of the facial animation and the comprehensibility of the plot were criticised, though. And the full release of the soundtrack for the film was not Free due to being limited to noncommercial use. These minor criticisms aside, Elephants Dream was a very successful production.

Big Buck Bunny, by contrast, is firmly in the Dreamworks mould of cartoon animal comedies. This is quite a change from the steampunk magical realism of Elephants Dream. I am of course reviewing it for Furtherfield because it is an example of producing high-quality animation using an alternative funding model and giving the results to society in a copyable, study-able, reworkable, remixable form that advances participatory culture rather than because cartoon animals trying to kill each other is funny.

As the film begins we encounter the titular oversized rabbit living in a bucolic paradise of rolling fields, fruit trees, birds and butterflies. Destruction and cruelty intrude into this green and pleasant land in the form of a trio of vindictive smaller mammals. Big of heart as well as of frame the rabbit is quickly driven over the edge by the intruders’ spite and sets out to teach them a lesson in a superbly crafted series of cartoon violence vignettes.

The plot and characterisations suffer briefly from an unfocused start but quickly rally to an amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny climax. There are a couple of cuts that don’t quite scan, but you’ll miss them if you blink. The modelling, animation and rendering are superior to Dreamworks fare such as “Over The Hedge”. Big Buck Bunny‘s animators have a much better dramatic and artistic grasp of what made old Warner Brothers cartoons funny than Dreamworks seem to have, or at least they have not been prevented from using that knowledge. Visual comedy is about timing and the timing of Big Buck Bunny has the musical quality of the best old slapstick film and animation.

Despite being the products of very different genres and therefore difficult to compare objectively, the character animation of Big Buck Bunny is a definite advance on that of “Elephants Dream”. The sets and character designs are softer than those for Elephants Dream but this is a natural outcome of the genre and the characters are animated more fluidly and expressively. On a technical level this is due in no small part to the improvements that the Peach project requested from Blender’s modelling and rendering capabilities. On an artistic level, the small but tight-knit group of animators have clearly played to their strengths and interests on a project free of corporate organisational restraints. Both of these dynamics provide useful lessons for other projects.

The two-DVD set of the film includes the model, texture, animation and rendering files used to make the film as well as various quality renders and the PAL and NTSC versions of the finished film. The Free Culture licence for these materials makes them easy to watch, study, modify and use just about any way you can think of. If only Hollywood cartoons or Japanese anime came with such extras in a usable format.

Big Buck Bunny, like Elephant’s Dream, was paid for in part by DVD pre-orders and it is Free Culture licenced under Creative Commons’s Attribution licence (CC-BY). That the Blender Foundation are using this funding model again (essentially the “Street Performer Protocol”) presumably shows that it has worked well for them. They are even talking about making enough money this time to start funding the next project. The success of this approach should encourage people looking for ways to fund Free Culture projects.

You can download the files for free but buying the DVDs funds future projects and provides you with a handy physical archive. The CC-BY licence means that if you own a physical or electronic copy of Big Buck Bunny you effectively own the work, Copyright is unable to stop you from sharing and using it as you wish. Big Buck Bunny is therefore on the side of those who wish to keep mass culture free and open rather than locked away behind onerous contracts or technological protection measures.

The CC-BY licence does not, unlike the GPL licence for software, require that you provide the sources used to make the finished work. Big Buck Bunny shows how useful and empowering providing source material for cultural works is. The fact that you have the source material and production files for the film means that you possess the means to not just remix the finished work but to re-produce it and make derivatives of it at the same level of detail and quality as the original. You can produce works that are peers to it, creatively and economically.

The Blender Foundation are building the creative, technical and economic resources needed to create a very different relationship between producers and consumers of mass culture. Big Buck Bunny quickly finds its feet to provide excellent entertainment that rewards repeated viewing. Opening up the artistry of making the film as a usable resource is therefore a treat as well as a valuable contribution to free culture. Now if only the full soundtrack had been released under a free licence this time…

http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

“Hacktivism” is a cool-sounding portmanteau word combining “hacking” and “activism”. Activism means political organisation and activity directed toward particular issues. Hacking can mean either “creative mastery and reworking” or “breaking and entering” of various systems, usually computer systems. The latter is more properly called “cracking”. Hacktivism tends to mean cracking rather than creative hacking. This means that hacktivism usually identifies, at most, a negativist posture of technological resistance to socioeconomic ills.

Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas have spun this ideological straw into critical gold. Their book Abstract Hacktivism is a collection of essays that reconsider the possibilities of activism and hacking, wrapped in an introduction and a postscript that draws these ideas together. It’s available as a very readable PDF or as a print version, which is an excellent example of how to make something that is available for free worth paying for.

The introduction introduces various ideas that will be found in both essays, notably hacktivism and the historical concept of society as various kinds of machines, and provides some context for each.

The first essay, “Hacking and Heresy” by von Busch, compares hacking to religious heresy, notably the socially inspired and socially flavoured Liberation Theology of South America. Hacking as heresy is a theologically and historically interesting metaphor. The history of liberation theology is of interest outside of immediate religious or socialist thought as a real-world case study in emergent alternative social and political organisation.

Hacking is immanent critique; it is in its practice and its products critique of an existing system, and it does bear comparison to critique of systems of thought expressed theologically or economically as well as technologically.

In my opinion, the mode of critique that hacking best bears comparison to is philosophy rather than heresy, the cargo cult of “killer apps”, and the convert’s zeal of a hacker with a new programming language or framework notwithstanding.

That said, von Bush’s specific comparison of hacking to the simultaneously theological and economic heresy of Liberation Theology is very instructive. Not for the first time the irrational (the unrepresentable or unrepresented) and the creative produced a space of resistance to the flattening effects of totalising forms of knowing or rationalising, be they economic, theological or technological. Liberation Theology is a socioeconomic-theological hack, modifying old forms to produce new forms that include previously excluded and denied possibilities.

To borrow another term from computer culture, Liberation Theology is also an “exploit”. It is a script for cracking the systems of society as expressed economically, politically and theologically for the benefit of the cracker(s). Exploits become known to the maintainer’s system they are against in time, and the system will be “patched” to withstand them. This has been the case for Liberation Theology, as von Busch shows.

“After Counterculture” by Palmas provides a context for these kinds of system and network-based considerations of social phenomena. Palmas describes how both culture and counterculture have moved from a 19th-century self-image based on machines and flows between reservoirs and motors to a 21st-century self-image based on hierarchy-free rhizomatic networks and how these models have been adopted both by corporate culture and those who seek to critique it.

In considering the symmetry between 1968 revolutionaries’ and corporate MBAs’ views of the world as a post-industrial hierarchy-free flatland, Palmas treads a similar path to Christine Harold’s more recent book “OurSpace”. Palmas shares Harold’s critique of AdBuster’s style 1990s anticorporatism. But where OurSpace catalogues, contextualizes and reinvigorates the strategies that both political activism and advertising have taken from Situationism, “After Counterculture” details the cultural context in which these strategies currently play out and how what is unique to network and free software thinking can supplant older strategies.

The socioeconomic hacks or exploits that Palmas considers include microeconomics, a success story that neither global capital nor negativist critique could produce. Microeconomics is definitely not an exploit. It does not compromise an existing system. Rather, it is a hack, creating a new possibility that extends both the system of global finances and the options available to those formerly excluded from it. This is precisely the kind of creative reworking of a system that earns the title of “hack” and is a form of political activism. The difference between microeconomics and trying to crash a corporation’s website could not be more marked.

The postscript draws together examples of both hacking and activism to caution against techno-determinism or believing that these ideas are somehow unknown to the existing economic or political order and to call for these ideas to be applied practically rather than simply as cool metaphors.

Abstract Hacktivism abstracts the concepts of computer hacking and political activism away from tired existing ideas of hacktivism, contextualises them, finds concrete examples of historical parallels, and recasts hacktivism as a positive extension and recreation of social and economic systems to realise progressive political aims within society. This move away from the literal cracking of existing computer systems in the service of negativist gesture politics is a powerful hack on the very concept of hacktivism. Hopefully, this will be embraced as an enlightening new philosophy rather than shunned as a political heresy.

https://www.body-pixel.com/tag/abstract-hacktivism/

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.